Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

How exactly an offhand comment about the angle of a woman's wrist in the corner of a beat-down gym leads to anything else, Annabeth can’t say. What she can say, though, is that it’s followed by no less than 4 brief remarks on the red-headed woman’s stance, approach angle and back posture.

A month or two later, after several more throw-away exchanges - including very little personal information other than yes, Pepper’s job is stressful and yes, Annabeth does like volunteering for a camp - Annabeth finds herself being told that Pepper is in need of a babysitter.

She does all she can to stop herself from laughing when the conversation begins - and she also smacks Leo later when he almost chokes on his own laughter at the thought of Annabeth, I have stabbed a being of every species I have ever encountered, Chase being a babysitter.

But, by the end of the conversation, she doesn’t really see any reason at all why she shouldn’t try for the job. Annabeth isn’t blind - she can clearly see by the state of Pepper’s attire that she’s well off, so the pay would be good, and it’s not like being a babysitter can be any harder than anything else that Annabeth has done in her nearly two decades of living and breathing.

Plus, if she’s being honest - which she always tries to be when she’s talking to herself, after all, what’s the point of lying to yourself - she’s not exactly in a position to pick and choose with jobs.

Sure, she has a scholarship, but it’s not all-expenses-paid - after all, no University can afford that right now, even if it has been 2 years since half the population of the Universe came back into existence - and New York isn’t getting any cheaper.

So she goes to the interview - birth certificate and academic transcript and police background check in hand. And she gets the job. They go out for pizza on the beach to celebrate.

It’s a good job - pay is great and everything. There’s only one thing that surprises Annabeth about the whole ordeal.

Pepper turns out to be Pepper Potts.

(“Potts-Stark, actually. I’m the Stark part in case you were wondering.”)

Oh, yeah. And that. She’s married to Tony Stark - which Annabeth knows that she knew before - but the fact doesn’t truly sink in until she’s face-to-face with the man in the living room of his (humble, in retrospect) home in one of the nicer neighbourhoods in Queens. The nicest - if she had to guess.

And life is nice. Annabeth is something around half-way through her Bachelor’s and so is Percy, and their tight-knit circle of friends and family are moving through life swimmingly.

Whatever the case, a babysitting job with the well-off family of the CEO of a Fortune 500 company and a mostly-retired superhero can’t make Annabeth’s rollercoaster of a life any more interesting than it already is.

Right?

“Hello, small human,” Annabeth greets. Morgan turns to look at Annabeth’s figure by her bedroom door and straightens considerably. She smiles.

“Hello, medium-sized human,” Morgan says, so formally that Annabeth almost expects her to stick her hand out for a handshake like she had the first time they’d met. She’d think that they were in a business meeting if not for Morgan’s standard squeaky 5-year-old voice.

Just because she’s used to their standard greeting doesn’t mean that Annabeth doesn’t still marvel on the regular at Morgan’s ability to mimic other people’s attitude.

“Daddy hasn’t left yet, right?” Morgan asks. Annabeth sets her backpack down at the edge of the room as she shakes her head.

“He’s still waiting for the car, why?” Morgan jumps up from her seat and sets a smile on her face. “You want to borrow Dum-E again?”

Morgan nods enthusiastically and puts both of her arms up towards her. When Annabeth doesn’t do anything, Moran says, rather sweetly: “Please.” Annabeth smiles, waiting a second before she raises her foot a few inches off of the ground. 

Morgan uses the foot as a stepping stone, before alternating between Annabeth’s two hands until she’s settled on the older girl’s shoulders.

“To the lab!” Morgan declares, pointing her finger decidedly. It would sound like a command except for the extreme squeak in her voice as she says the last word.

They wind through the hallways towards the lab that Annabeth knows Mr. Stark is in, sidetracked only by a brief conversation about back pain.

“-trick is that you start young, Morgan,” Annabeth is telling her as she, and in turn, Morgan, steps into the lab. “If you start practicing keeping your back straight now, then when you’re really old-”

“Like Daddy!” Morgan puts in, prompting her father to spin in his seat towards them with a sound of protest.

“-you won’t have to worry too much about back pain and slouching and the like.”

“Not that it’s not great advice, but I don’t think that Morgs will need military posture,” Mr. Stark says. Before he can continue, Morgan puts in:

“Uncle Rhodey said I could be in the Air Force!”

“Uncle Rhodey should try saying that to Mommy’s face,” Mr. Stark says sweetly. “In the meantime, what can I do for you, Little Miss Morgan?”

Morgan asks (read: sweetly demands) to take Dum-E, probably to continue the small, though still a ways above what other kids her age would be doing, experiments that she’s been fixated on for at least the last two weeks.

“Boss, the car is here,” says the voice of the house’s AI, FRIDAY.

“I’ll do you one better, you can use the lab while I’m gone,” he says, getting up from his seat and flicking his hands in various directions, the movement closing the holograms that Annabeth saw when she entered.

“But,” he says.

“But,” Morgan echoes.

“But, you have to pinky-promise not to start the next experiment until I get back.” Morgan pretends to deliberate for a second (which Annabeth deduces from the intense sounds of humming coming from above her head) before sticking out a pinky decisively.

“Deal!”

“Okie-dokie then,” Mr. Stark says, shaking her pinky finger with his own. “FRI, turn on the Tricycle Protocol.”

“Already done, Boss.”  

Annabeth raises Morgan up from her shoulders and deposits her in the seat especially reserved for her, directly beside the one that Mr. Stark had just been using. She sets to work immediately, moving the holograms with practiced, if floppy, movements.

Mr. Stark looks at his watch. “I’ll be back in 2 or 3 hours - probably less if Wilson decides to give us all a little mercy and cut the meeting short,” he tells Annabeth as he moves towards the door, grabbing a jacket off of an otherwise unused chair. “So you should be free to go around seven-ish.”

Annabeth is not, as it turns out, free to go around seven-ish. Instead, what she does receive at eight-ish - instead of a goodbye as she heads out the door - is a message from Mr. Stark.

“Boss would like me to inform you that, quote: ‘my suffering is to continue for some time longer.’” No shit, Mr. Stark.

Morgan is currently washing her hands from being elbow deep in the underbelly of a short, rusty and dusty grandfather clock that she had shifted her attention to after finishing her experiment, and which Annabeth is sure has no business at all being in this lab.

Morgan should have been in bed already, from what Annabeth knows about her bedtime schedule - which she also knows is considerably more lax when Pepper is out of town, as she is right now - Tokyo, specifically.

Annabeth had let her stay up only because she was waiting for Mr. Stark to return - but when the clock had struck 8, she had told Morgan to tuck her things away. (Dum-E had whirred sadly, though Morgan had been more vocal about her own distaste.)

“He says: sad face emoji.”  

That’s comforting.

It’s almost nine when Mr. Stark’s next message comes in. Morgan is tucked in and sound asleep - Annabeth can tell. (She was head-counselor of cabin 6 for more than a decade (and she technically still is) - she knows when a kid is faking it as much as she knows how to make them go to sleep in the first place.)

(Both skills are ones that she won’t share. She had to learn them the hard way so everyone else should rightly suffer through the learning experience as well; it’s only fair.)

She’s sitting at a small table in the corner of Morgan’s room, working on her homework with the aid of a small desk lamp, far enough away that she’s sure that any noise she makes won’t wake the younger girl up.

“Boss says: ‘I’m working on getting someone else over there,’” FRIDAY’s voice buzzes quietly, the AI adept at realising the mood of the room, as well as the time.

“‘You should be able to go soon.’”

“‘Gonna take a minute, though.’”

“‘Almost everyone I know is at this meeting.’”

“Tell him I’m already here later than I was supposed to be,” she tells FRIDAY evenly. “I can stay until he gets back.” She’s not in the habit of being passive aggressive - she prefers to just be aggressive, it’s simpler and more effective. But she’s trying it out more often nowadays.

If she’s being honest, there’s no particular place that she has to be tonight. She doesn’t have any plans with her friends or any meetings at camp or anything. She’s doing exactly what she would have been doing had she been at home. Homework.

At the moment, she’s working on the unnecessary extra course work that is Project Economics. 

As a side note - do you think that if she walked up to the best architecture firm in New York City and asked the head what the most important thing about architecture is, they would answer ‘Project Economics?’ 

No.

No. They would not. That is because the applications of financial analysis are not something that’d be the first thing on her mind if she was designing a recreational skyscraper in, say, LA - arguably the most earthquake-prone city in the United States. It would be something like the eighth thing on her mind, way below keeping the people who would live and/or work in that building from being killed as a result of a crush injury.

No - Project Economics is an unnecessary course piled on to the required course listings by either the Dean or an overzealous and conniving-

“Boss says: smiley face emoji, folded hands emoji.”

Project Economics was probably the last thing on Tony Stark’s mind when he made the Iron Man suit - and she’d like to beat that fact over Professor Harrison’s head the next time he asks her if her proposal wouldn’t have benefited from the use of carefully-placed humourous subtext.

She feels that this is the reason why she’s being more passive-aggressive than plain aggressive lately. Because it doesn’t matter if she has the highest GPA of all of Columbia’s Architectural Studies students, she still can’t throw her thickest book at any of her Professors - even Professor Harrison.

And it is her thickest book that she’s still reading (can you still call it reading if it’s happening at such an excruciatingly slow speed?) when Mr. Stark arrives back at the house.

It’s almost eleven when he peaks his head into the room. He has the decency to look just a little bit sheepish as he does, though the look quickly melts off his face. Annabeth starts packing her things away, closing her thick notebook and putting it in her backpack directly beside her even thicker line of textbooks.

“You’d think that a team as well equipped as the Avengers would be able to condense their on-going stream of nonsense into 2 or 3 hours,” he says, Annabeth standing and pushing in the small, 5-year-old sized chair that she’d been using back under the likewise sized table.

He walks with her to the door. “Sorry about the wait and all.”

Annabeth doesn't say that it's okay or that it was no problem - instead, she says: “She might have made some changes to that clock in your lab.”

Because, sure, it might not have messed up her ‘schedule’ or anything - this time - but she hates it when people tell her things that are wrong. She may not be being passive aggressive because it wasn’t exactly Mr. Stark’s fault but that doesn’t mean she wants to encourage this to happen again.

“Yeah?” Mr. Stark says. “She have fun?”

“It sure seemed like it - she was definitely grumpy when I told her she had to go to bed,” Annabeth says as they reach the door.

“How’d you manage that anyway - I can barely drag her out of the lab most nights.”

“That is a secret I keep very close to my internal organs,” Annabeth says as she steps out of the house. Mr. Stark leans against the open door.

“You have a ride home, kid?” he says.

“Subway,” she says, swinging her backpack over her shoulder.

“My car can drive you home.”

“I’ll take the subway,” she repeats. “Goodnight, Mr. Stark.”

He doesn’t protest (she prides herself on her ability to leave no room for argument in her conversations) even though he looks like he wants to. “‘Night.” She sees how he checks his watch as she turns and walks down the front steps.

What she doesn’t see is how he asks FRIDAY to make sure that Annabeth makes it to the station safely. 

“That kid is a miracle worker,” he says to himself quietly as he pulls Morgan’s blanket up higher over her shoulders and tucks the little Spider-Man plushy in beside her and the line of similar plushies. 

“And Miss Chase did not even have to resort to bribery,” FRIDAY puts in helpfully.

“Sorcery - I’m calling it,” Tony says. “Actually - no - scratch that. Please don’t be sorcery.”

“Perhaps Master Morgan simply listens to Miss Chase,” FRIDAY says as Tony closes the door, leaving it only slightly ajar.

“Oh, shut up, FRI.” His AI only buzzes slightly in response.

Chapter Text

Annabeth does try to figure out what in all the planes of existence was going on in her brain those months ago when she had decided that Myth and Literature was a good choice for her Liberal Studies course. It must have been a fucking mess in there, honestly.

“No.”

“Annabeth,” Percy says sweetly as they walk down the street.

“No - the dude practically worships Homer - he thinks that every word he ever wrote was gold,” she says. “It’s a - a mess! He’s not even open to criticism, prancing around the class like he was there, spewing Homer’s bullshit for another class of impressionable scholars!”

“You know what really happened, Wise Girl,” he says appeasingly as they stop across the street from the Potts-Stark house. “If he’s telling a different version of-”

“The wrong version!” she interrupts. “Everyone knows that she was born out of the foam - he’s just trying to be contradictory!” She blows out a breath and straightens, turning to face him again. He’s barely containing his laughter.

She smacks his arm good-naturedly. “Rude.”

“Annabeth? What does o-nei-ro-mancy mean?” Morgan asks, stumbling through the complicated syllables.

Annabeth looks up from her own reading and tilts her head at the younger girl sitting across from her at the small table. Her brain makes subtle connections even though she already knows what the word means.

Oneiros, greek → dream. 

Manteia, greek → prophecy.

“It’s when people use the interpretation of dreams to predict the future - what are you reading, Morgan?” The tablet she’s using isn’t displaying an open page, but a cover page. Annabeth can’t make out the title upside down, though she doubts that it would be much easier if it wasn’t inverted, either.

“Dreams, Bilingualism, and Oneiromancy in Ptolemaic Egypt,” she recites slowly, enunciating the words carefully. “FRIDAY recommended it.”

“Master Morgan requested to choose from Dr. Banner’s recently read list,” the AI says as if to defend itself. Or rather, herself, right? Themself? Does FRIDAY identify as a female? Annabeth asks.

“That is how I am programmed, Miss Chase, yes.”

Annabeth and Morgan share their own pronouns - she and her, and she and her, respectively. There’s a mutual hum in the room as Annabeth and Morgan go back to their reading once again. 

But it’s not long (approximately the same length of time it takes before Morgan starts looking towards her bookshelf in search of another book) until Annabeth is distracted - Festus identifies as a male, right? Leo says he’s a good boy - and not long after that that her reading is once again interrupted by FRIDAY’s voice.

“Boss and Boss have returned.”

Annabeth glances at her watch briefly and confirms that they’re some 3 or 4 hours earlier than they’d told her they would be. Morgan is already out of her chair and skipping out of the room, Annabeth keeping pace with the 5-year-old vessel of pure energy.

Morgan only makes it into the room a second earlier than Annabeth but by the time she gets a visual, the girl is already perched in her mother’s arms and rushing through what must be her third sentence.

Pepper is nodding along, making appropriate noises of agreement and understanding. Annabeth figures that she must be used to the overflow of words from what she’s seen of the similarities between Morgan and her father. If she goes from what she remembers off-handedly about distant news reports, Pepper was Mr. Stark’s personal secretary before she was CEO of SI and before she was his girlfriend, and now, his wife.

She’s informed that they’re back early because they’re going to catch a later flight - which means they’ll be gone for the night instead of the pocket in the afternoon that they had told Annabeth it would be.

“Ooh!” Morgan says. “Can Annabeth sleep over?” Annabeth would be the last to admit that she’s a bit taken aback at the question, though she doesn’t think that it shows on her face. 

Annabeth had never had a single sleepover as a child - she doesn’t think that camping in the woods for quests and her years of staying at camp really counts in this context. She certainly never had sleepovers while she still lived at her father’s.

Then again, there were a lot of things that were part of a ‘normal’ childhood that she never had while she lived at her father’s - or at any of the other places she’s lived, either.

“Maybe another time, honey,” Pepper says. “Aunt Nebula’s gonna stay with you tonight and tomorrow.”

“Oooooh!!!” Morgan says, almost buzzing in her mother’s arms. “Can we watch The Smurfs this time? Please, Mommy?”

“No,” Mr. Stark says, smiling. Pepper laughs outright before shaking her own head. Morgan pouts for a second before she gets excited again, muttering to herself as she jostles to be let go, Pepper depositing her back on the ground. She promptly runs past the three adults, presumably to her room.

She returns rather quickly, lugging Annabeth’s backpack with her into the living room. (She really just drags it on the floor behind herself.)

“Here you go,” Morgan says, wiping imaginary sweat off of her forehead and blowing out a heavy breath. “Your bag is heavy,” she stage-whispers. She momentarily wraps her arms around Annabeth’s legs in a brief hug - Annabeth pats her head - before she’s off towards her bedroom again.

Annabeth doesn’t bother checking if everything is in the bag, she can tell by its weight that it is - each of her books weighs a rather noticeable amount - as she swings it over her shoulder. Morgan must be very excited about her sleepover.

Annabeth is very excited herself about tomorrow. She’s starting the dagger demos for her youngest class at camp - Chiron had convinced her to hold off the dagger exercises up until now, telling her that the self-defense techniques would be enough for the interim. She isn’t fully convinced yet but Chiron had made a good argument. (And he is still technically the one in charge.)

(Very, very technically, if you asked the people in their little circle.)

‘Another time’ turns out to be a few weeks later - instead of the nice time slot of never that Annabeth had assumed it would be tucked away into - when Pepper has to jet out on short notice to deal with one of SI’s overseas projects, Mr. Stark already out of town for a two-day conference on malnutrition and the impoverished in the face of the Blip.

Mr. Stark had decided, probably quite appropriately, that this was not one of those conferences that he could take Morgan to.

She gets the call while Morgan is in the bathroom, Annabeth already at the Potts-Stark house babysitting for what was originally a full day of meetings on Pepper’s part.

“If you can’t, then that’s completely fine, Annabeth,” Pepper’s voice comes through the speakers normally reserved for the household’s AI. “Just since you’re already there.”

Annabeth processes the request as Pepper speaks, deliberating quickly and quietly in the efficient manner that Annabeth associates with herself and most of the cabin six lot.

(She’s not fully aware of the fact that this isn’t exactly the only thing that the other demigods associate with the cabin six lot’s decision making process. She’s not really privy to those specific conversations and opinions. (Words like ‘loud,’ and ‘shrieking,’ as well as ‘unnecessary’ and ‘violence’ often find themselves involved.) That’s because, contrary to popular belief, those demigods, and demigods in the general sense, do not have a death wish - at least not when dealing with Annabeth Chase.)

“‘Till noon tomorrow?” she confirms.

“Yes - I’m flying back as early as possible. Even if there are any delays, Tony will be back by then too.”

“That works for me, Mrs. Potts.”

“Thank you, Annabeth.”

Morgan is decidedly incredibly thrilled by the ‘sleepover,’ only losing her bright attitude briefly when Annabeth tells her that she will not, in fact, be wearing matching PJs. Though Annabeth does applaud her inclination to try. She doubts that anyone else who knows her would even try to broach that topic - or dare try to convince her like Morgan had.

Except Leo.

Leo is… well, he’s certainly one of a kind.

Actually - Leo doesn’t have enough of a death wish to try and convince her either.

Maybe Harley. No - definitely Harley. Harley does, in fact, have a death wish - one of the areas in which he patently surpasses his older brother.

Regardless, Annabeth does not end up in matching PJs - she wonders idly where exactly Morgan was planning on acquiring them anyway.

Annabeth only seems to reflect on her decision to watch Morgan overnight when FRIDAY wishes them goodnight. This is the point which makes Annabeth wonder what exactly the fuck she was thinking when she agreed. When she agreed to sleep in a house that is practically an assortment of four-wall technology arrangements.

No - there is no way in Hades that she is sleeping in this literal nightmare of a house, which might as well have been designed as a mousetrap. Except, instead of a mouse, it’s any and all monsters. And instead of cheese, it’s Annabeth.

The lights start to dim in Morgan’s room for ideal sleeping conditions almost on cue for Annabeth’s impending internal crisis. Or crises - how about she sees how many ways she can have a crisis about this.

Probably as many ways as there are monsters that could kill her after being drawn in by the oodles of technology surrounding her.

Needless to say, Annabeth doesn’t sleep - which seems to be the only thing that is going according to plan at the moment. But - and this is important - she’s not-sleeping because she has homework to do, not because of the threat of monsters.

No, seriously. It’s the homework. She might as well be failing Bodily Comfort Systems - she got A’s on her last two assignments. 

A’s!

A few hours later, a slight ding emanates from her phone - her N-phone that is. Annabeth owns two phones (like many of her half-blood friends) - a fact that she isn’t really keen with sharing with the few mortal friends that she has, mostly because they almost immediately suspect that she’s a drug runner or something of the like.

(She isn’t.)

One is a mortal flip phone, a newer version of the same model that her first phone had been. It’s for the regular phone calls with regular phones and the like, for those who aren’t demigods (or mortals who are part of their little demigod-ly circle) and, as such, don’t have access to N-phones.

The N-phone is a creation of the joint work of Leo and Harley - originally named something that’s too long and contains too many uses of the word ‘supreme’ for Annabeth to care to remember. When you call someone using the phone, it uses the Iris Messaging system to make contact with another N-phone.

(After much debate about the name, the duo had agreed to scale down their extravagant (and amazing, everyone was assured) naming system. They filtered through several cabin-nine-themed names until they finally settled on just: the Nine-Phone.)

(Leo and Harley both agreed that it was a horrible name and Annabeth did too, though it was certainly better than some of their other naming ideas. They all agreed that it was for the best to just shorten it to N-phone and try not to speak of the experience again.)

The ding signals a message from Harley.

[02:41]

HK: [image] [image ID: animated image of a young ninja with long black hair (Sasuke) being choked with one extended hand, hand connects to a real image of a blonde chef (Gordan Ramsey) with his arm extended. Caption: You’re weak Sasuke… you lack seasoning. end of image ID]

You’d think that Annabeth, a demigod with respect for the whole ‘technology might get you killed’ thing, wouldn’t have any knowledge of meme culture - that she’d be completely out of touch with her fellow peers. Annabeth sometimes almost wishes that this were the case.

Harley, however, made it his mission to keep them all very much in the know - he actually said once that it was his duty to translate the memes for the rest of them for easy access given that he doesn’t have dyslexia. He’s blocked by a long list of fellow demigods for his efforts.

AC: isn’t it past your bedtime?

The response is almost instantaneous.

HK: [image] [image ID: image of a man with shoulder-length blonde hair (Boromir), dressed in medieval clothing, gesturing with his right hand. Caption: One does not simply // go to sleep before 3 am. end of image ID]

HK: since when are you Miss sleep schedule

AC: you need as many functioning brain cells as you can get

AC: go to sleep youngin

HK: ur only a year older than me 

HK: i’m offended

AC: don’t remind me

AC: every time i close my eyes you’re literally still 12

HK: ha ha. don’t you need functioning brain cells too

AC: correction

AC: i only need one 

AC: it’s worked for me so far

And her single brain cell carries her through the rest of her homework that night, a cup of coffee getting her through the home stretch that is the next morning. 

At noon, there’s someone at the door. Annabeth leaves Morgan to her watching when the doorbell rings, the younger girl’s face much too close to the tablet that she’s using.

On her way to the door, FRIDAY informs her that Boss and Boss have been unable to make it back in time, and have as such arranged for a family friend to watch Morgan until they do, so that Annabeth doesn’t have to stay any later than arranged.

Annabeth has heard a lot about Morgan’s various aunts, uncles, and similarly titled family friends. Some certainly sound more like family than they do friends. Regardless, she hasn’t met any of them in her months as Morgan’s babysitter.

Really, this makes sense - Annabeth is only there because Morgan’s parents can’t be - as well as the many family friends that would otherwise be tasked with looking after her.

The moment when Annabeth opens the door marks her first meeting with any of Morgan’s ‘extended family.’ (Some part of her thinks that the most interesting was picked to be the first - given the colour.)

The person that greets her is blue. Percy will definitely enjoy this story.

Though, in fairness, they’re blue and purple. With a little red. And- the point, generally, is that they are blue. And that’s not completely normal. Annabeth does her standard once over as quickly as she can - and she can tell that the other woman - she assumes that they’re a woman - is doing the same - before she extends her hand.

“Annabeth,” she says as the other woman glances at the offered hand. Annabeth hears Morgan’s pattering feet behind her, bringing her out of her bedroom and into the hallway.

Her handshake is accepted and the woman says: “Nebula.” Her grip is firm but not intentionally painful as she shakes her hand and Annabeth resists the urge to tighten her own grip in response. She tries to keep things on the down-low in general.

If her introduction hadn’t been confirmation enough, Annabeth’s mind soon connects the dots between Nebula and Aunt Nebula, just in time for Morgan to arrive and shout:

“Aunt Nebula!” and barrel towards her for a hug, practically strangling her legs in her usual form. Morgan pulls away just far enough to look up and ask: “Did you bring Rocket, too?”

“Yes,” Nebula says as she steps inside. “The raccoon is-”

“Parking,” finishes an accented voice at the end of the house’s walkway - Brooklyn, most likely.

Annabeth’s view is blocked by the door until the voice arrives inside as well, almost surprising Annabeth for the second time in one day. A - much shorter than she had expected. B - probably not from Brooklyn.

Annabeth takes it in stride and extends her hand once again when the - Nebula had said racoon, right? - seems to spot her by the door. “Annabeth.”

He seems the one to be taken aback by the exchange, scrunching up his eyebrows before he shakes her hand more tentatively than his companion had. “Rocket,” he says with his eyebrows still scrunched.

His hesitancy is knocked off his face as Morgan nearly knocks him down with a hug and a scream of “Rocket!” They collectively step far enough into the house for Annabeth to be able to close the door behind them.

Annabeth leaves them to their devices as they move towards the living room, moving herself back to Morgan’s room to pack up her things to leave. By the time she gets back, they’re already settled, Nebula and Rocket seemingly in the middle of recounting a story for Morgan, who is perched on an armrest, her feet dangling just above her aunt’s lap.

She tries to slip out with a quick goodbye but Morgan is very, very loud. And she asks, very, very loudly, in a sweet voice with a tilt of the head and puppy-dog eyes to accompany, if Annabeth can stay a little while longer and play with them.

Normally, she’d check with the other people there if this was approved with them before she decided on her answer but there’s no decision to be made this time. She double-checks the time just to be sure but it’s just as she’d thought it would be. 

“Maybe next time, Morgan,” she tells her. “I have to be somewhere.”

She’s lucky that Nebula and Rocket came when they did, otherwise she would have been late. Late for her shift. Because, sure, babysitting for billionaires might pay well, but it’s still just part-time.

And, at the end of the day, Annabeth is still a Struggling University Student.

Chapter Text

Annabeth peeks her head out of Morgan’s room, before her brain realises that Pepper and Mr. Stark can’t see her from the front of the house. She makes her way out, moving towards the living room that connects nearly directly to the front door, hoping to find them before Mr. Stark yells “I’m home!” or a similar declaration like he often does when he gets back to the house.

She finds them in time, putting in: “Nice trip?”

“Yeah, smooth at least,” Mr. Stark says. “Where’s the Mongoose?”

“She’s napping,” Annabeth says.

“Already?” Pepper asks from the kitchen, where she’s pulling a large assortment of food out from the fridge, and then some more from the cupboards.

“She tired herself out,” Annabeth explains. “She was on the walls for most of the morning.”

“And you’re sure you’re still in one piece?” Mr. Stark checks. Pepper rinses an unreasonable amount of lettuce under the water from the tap.

Annabeth nods. “She put two feet on the ground for long enough to learn how to do a cartwheel.”

“Seriously?!” Mr. Stark says, his eyebrows up and smile wide. “Oh my God, Pep, I don’t know if I’m qualified to parent a gymnast.” Pepper offers a laugh, her smile bright too. “And in one afternoon?”

“Well, Annabeth’s a good teacher,” Pepper says.

“Don’t tell me she taught you how to do a cartwheel, too.”

“No,” she starts.

“Backflip? Handstand?” Pepper’s smile returns. “Round-off?”

“How to properly kick a guy where it hurts, more like,” Pepper puts in, and Mr. Stark sticks his hands up above his head in surrender. “It’s how I first met our wonderful babysitter.”

Mr. Stark opens his mouth to respond when his phone rings; he lets his head fall back and he groans in defeat, picking up finally with a ‘Yello!’ Annabeth goes to gather her things from Morgan’s room, moving out of the living room through the kitchen. As she passes behind Pepper, the kitchen knife on the counter wobbles, and it falls off, Annabeth catching it by the handle halfway to the ground.

“Thanks,” Pepper breaths out.

“No problem,” Annabeth says, and replaces the knife on the counter, farther from the edge than it had previously been.

“Would you mind helping me with the salad for a minute before you go?” Pepper asks after a moment of visible deliberation. “I have…”

“A million things to do?” Annabeth finishes.

“Yes.” A look of you have no idea hangs in the corners of her face, a look that Annabeth recognizes.

“How big do you want the lettuce?” she asks, pushing up her long sleeves for the millionth time and moving to wash her hands.

“Smaller than medium,” Pepper decides after she lets out a small breath.

The knife is blunter than she’s used to (which doesn’t really mean much in comparison to her knife, but it’s also blunter than Sally’s kitchen knives, which is annoying) and she switches it out for another that she takes out of the utensil drawer after only two chops. The lettuce is crisp and Annabeth rather appreciates the crunch that she hears on loop as she chops. Chopping is her favourite part of cooking by a long shot.

“How’s school?” Pepper starts. “Is everything going smoothly?”

“Yes, smooth as silk, for the most part,” she says. “What about SI? I didn’t catch the ceremony; did it go well?” Three months after the Blip, the President declared October 23rd to be a public holiday, officially referred to as the Restoration, though ‘The Blip’ had already gained too much popularity to be replaced. He’d assured the public that while they were downgrading the Snap from an official public holiday, it would still be a day of observance and hold the same significance as it previously had.

Pepper sets to work on washing the bell peppers. “It did, actually,” she says, something at the edge of her tone tight. “This year’s charities got enough funding for the next two and a half years.” On the first anniversary of ‘the Restoration,’ Stark Industries and the Avengers, technically an affiliate group of the former, held a ‘banquet.’ Last week marked the second anniversary of the Blip, and, as a result, the second ceremony.

Annabeth’s face as she glances towards Pepper says, but?

“We could’ve gone without the entire House of Representatives. Foreign diplomats are appropriate; the Senate? Sure- and even then we could go without them,” she says, moving as if on autopilot as she lines the bell peppers up beside Annabeth’s cutting board. “There was a reason we didn’t have the President there but it seems like no one in Congress looked or listened for long enough to realize.”

Pepper moves seamlessly from one topic to the next as she opens a bag of cucumbers. “So how’s your volunteering going? At that camp.” Mr. Stark’s pacing in the living room comes to an end as his phone call does the same; Annabeth transitions to the bell peppers, thankful that she hadn’t stuck with the blunt knife, because then this would have been a different kind of pain.

“It’s great,” Annabeth says, a smile forming in the corners of her mouth. “I’m there as often as I can be - most weekends.” ‘Volunteering’ sounds so much better than head-counseling, training, directing, and acting as a head organizer - especially since downplaying her involvement minimizes the risk of questions. 

Keeping things on the down-low about demigods and CHB has transitioned over the years from a general precaution to something stronger. Now, people don’t make comments about her being overly cautious about keeping the mystical side of things secret like they had a decade ago - they can all look back and realize that Annabeth had been ahead of the curve. Now, all she has to do is point to public opinion towards mutants, or to the relatively short-lived Accords, or to anything else on that ever-expanding list.

Mr. Stark has made himself busy with a second cutting board on the other side of where Pepper is still unpacking and arranging the food, stealing the freshly washed cucumbers from her pile. Annabeth continues to chop away at her own vegetables.

“They’ll be a bit late - traffic and all,” Mr. Stark says. “And Wilson wants to talk afterwards.” Pepper makes a face that’s only half visible to Annabeth from where she’s standing.

“What about?” she asks.

“Veteran’s Day,” Mr. Stark says, chopping away at the half-peeled cucumbers in even, rhythmic movements.

“I thought we finished those discussions last year,” Pepper says, her tone matching her husband’s, if slightly more irritated.

“Well, Ross is pretty determined,” he says, motioning with his knife-wielding hand. “Always has been. It’s like ol’ Thaddy thinks he’s doing us a favour.” Pepper hums as Annabeth finishes with her bell peppers.

Mr. Stark reaches in the fridge and brings out a jar of olives; Pepper guides his hand back into the fridge with a tilt of her head and an ‘uh-uh.’ Mr. Stark makes a face and obliges as Pepper turns towards the cupboards to find something. 

“Regardless of how tedious it is,” Pepper says, “Sam still has to entertain him - you know how quickly opinion can turn and people can get pissed for no reason.”

He pulls the olives back out while her back is turned, putting a finger to his lips and shaking his head in Annabeth’s direction before he slides the jar over on the counter and motions for her to chop some up.

The exchange reminds her distantly of the kitchen in Sally’s apartment, with Sally and Paul sliding past each other, stealing condiments and sides from the fridge. An image of Percy swapping her bowl of raspberries for one filled with blueberries while she’s not looking flashes in her mind, bringing a soft smile to her lips as she clears the food off of her chopping board and into a giant salad bowl.

“Doesn’t mean that we have to be happy about it,” he says. She takes some olives and slides the jar back towards her employer, dicing up the olives into 4 parts each with rapid movements. 

“Or serious, either,” he continues. “I just want Wilson to say, ‘Ross has an offer,’ and let me respond, ‘thank you, next’ and just move on.” Mr. Stark manages to return the jar to the fridge just in time for Pepper to turn back around, take one look at his face and raise an elegant eyebrow. He blinks rapidly and makes a who, me? face as Annabeth finishes with the olives and reaches over, snatching all of the cucumbers piled up beside his cutting board save for one.

Pepper takes another moment to spy the olives and make another face at her husband before she continues on with her work. Mr. Stark smiles wide, all of his teeth on display.

“Maybe he will,” Pepper finally puts in. “You underestimate how much Sam dislikes Ross.” Mr. Stark concedes a hum that signals his agreement.

He narrows his eyes once he turns his attention back to his cutting board, before spying the cucumbers in front of Annabeth.

“If you don’t slow down you’ll take your fingers off too,” he warns. Annabeth is tempted to continue her dicing with her eyes closed. Instead, she weighs her head from side to side and finishes off her last cucumber, before clearing her cutting board again in one smooth movement. She eyes his last remaining cucumber purposefully and he makes an indignant noise.

“I’ll have you know that I am the salad king of this house,” he says.

“Yes,” Pepper states, a hand on his shoulder as a show of support. Annabeth hears the distant pattering of feet. “The king of salads; also known as: the only man who lives in this house.” Mr. Stark wiggles his shoulders and says:

“Rude.”

“Yeah, mommy,” Morgan says, crossing her arms with a touch of difficulty in plain view of the three adults. “Uh, rude.”

“My apologies, dearest husband,” Pepper concedes with a smile. “The Morgan has spoken.”

Mr. Stark’s smile splits wider on his face. “And how was the Morgan’s day?” he inquires.

Morgan’s eyes light up. “You’ll never guess what I did today!”

Mr. Stark’s hand goes to his chest. “Dear me, what’d’ya do? You didn’t solve climate change, did you? Because I coulda sworn I had dibs on that.” Morgan gives a giggle that makes her vibrate on the spot.

“No! Watch!” she demands, and Annabeth backs up until she’s out of the kitchen area, clearing their view. “I’ll show you!” And she wastes absolutely no time in sticking her hands above her head and moving her legs into a lunge in what Annabeth would characterize as an aggressive way. In her haste, she wobbles a bit in her movement. But other than a high-pitched sound of caught-off-guard excitement, Morgan doesn’t seem to let it bother her.

She does the cartwheel and both her parents nearly shriek in excitement. Morgan bows elegantly, her hair flipping over her faces and remaining there after she re-orients herself. Pepper and Mr. Stark holler and clap as Morgan tucks the stray hairs behind her ears and smiles brightly.

Annabeth offers her a high-five (which she accepts) and a “That was beautiful,” before she leaves Morgan to her parents’ praise. She turns the necessary corners and moves through the required hallways on her way to Morgan’s room to collect her things.

She tucks her notebook and open textbook back into her bag once she gets there, spotting a stray pen that Annabeth recognizes as her own at the foot of Morgan’s bed. She nabs it off the floor, straightening Morgan’s blanket unconsciously as she stands.

The red-and-blue-clad superhero smiles wide at her from the blanket, standing beside Iron Man, who wears a similar expression on his mask. Beside Morgan’s bed, a row of plushies sit on a stool-shaped table, many of them depicting members of the Avengers in bright costumes (something about the plushies tells Annabeth that they’re not store-bought, though she can’t put a finger on exactly what it is). It’s something of a theme in the way Morgan’s room is decorated - even her walls, which are painted in bold shades of red, blue, and gold, blend in seamlessly with the colour scheme created by all of the Avengers knick-knacks.

Annabeth can’t stop the shiver that sends itself up her spine as she spots yet another tattered stuffed animal, this one in the shape of a brown spider, eyes giant in a way Annabeth assumes is supposed to be cute but only succeeds in making her skin crawl further.

It’s a stuffed animal, Annabeth reminds herself. And then again, because it barely works the first time: it’s just a stuffed animal.

She turns her back to it even though she loathes to do so (even though everything she knows tells her not to), slipping the pen back into her backpack and swinging the backpack over her shoulder.

Stepping back out into the hallway, she can’t decide whether to take a deep breath or to let one out. She ultimately goes with the former, followed, eventually, by the latter.

She focuses on her steps as she makes her way back to the kitchen, where Morgan is speaking from her perch on the centre island.

“-that he’s coming over for Thanksgiving,” Morgan says, frowning. “But I thought we were having it somewhere else this year.”

Later, she’ll probably remember what Pepper says in response, but right now her brain leaves her momentarily. It goes for a run on the other side of the city, her hearing abandoning her as her eyesight focuses on a piece of nothing just left of the centre kitchen island. Later, she knows for sure, the audio memory will pop back up in her head and fill in the empty section of the conversation like it had always been there to begin with.

But right now, the next thing she hears is her name, and her brain materializes back into her mind to register:

“-I’ve actually been meaning to ask,” Mr. Stark says, as Morgan passes Annabeth on the left - practically teleporting to Annabeth’s eyes from where she had seen her last - on her way back down the hall towards her room, caught up in her own space, rubbing her hands together excitedly. “You’re doing architecture at Columbia, right?”

Annabeth doesn’t know what she was expecting but this wasn’t it. “Yeah,” she says, “I’m in my second year.” The why? goes unspoken but Annabeth is pretty darn sure that it’s written on her face.

“I thought so,” he says, “but I was skimming some September Foundation files on the jet and I found an application with your name on it - in the M.I.T. stream.” He shrugs his shoulders, like, what’s up with that? And then, he says: “What’s up with that?”

And Annabeth is shot back a couple years, and then five more for good measure - to before the snap, right around the time she was applying to post-secondary. She blinks. Right around the time she’d applied to Columbia and M.I.T. because she’d always wanted to, even though every day she’d been inching closer and closer to the idea of going to the college in New Rome - to the idea of not having to die by age eighteen.

But then she’d disappeared into thin air at seventeen.

And then she’d come back, still seventeen, after five years and some months in change. And she’d pushed M.I.T. out the door for the same reason she and Percy had decided to do the same with the idea of going to New Rome.

Because they’d disappeared and Sally and Paul and Estelle hadn’t, and neither of them could stand the idea of being separated from their family again for school. (Despite the fact that Sally had told them through her tears that they should not be making this decision for her.)

(But CHB was also close to collapse and they needed a leader - as much as she hated to admit it, they needed her and they needed Percy. No substitutions allowed. (It didn’t matter that they gave her empty assurances, she could see how they were close to crumbling in a way that she’d never seen before.))

She blinks. “Yeah,” she says, allowing the information to come back to her. “They recommended that we put in our information for the September Foundation if we were applying to M.I.T. - to expedite the process.”

“Ah,” he says, in recognition, and then, as an afterthought: “So you didn’t get in.” Pepper turns once and blinks in his direction with an unimpressed look. Before he can respond or Pepper can dissect him on the spot, Annabeth puts in:

“I did get in,” and he turns towards her with a face. It occurs to her after half a second that he’s offended.

“And…” he says, the word dripping with 'are you kidding me?’ “you went with Columbia instead.” His tone tries to turn into a non-judgmental one mid-sentence, but he does a horrible job of it.

“I guess I just couldn’t bear to be away from New York,” she offers in what isn’t even trying to be a genuine way.

“Uh-huh,” he says, not believing her in the slightest, his face dripping on to his hand as he leans on the island. “Hmm.” He turns his head to Pepper, nodding in understanding. “So she’s fired.”

“Obviously,” Pepper offers.

“You can send my last paycheck to the usual address,” she puts in agreeably, readjusting how her backpack sits on her shoulder just to have something to do before she starts to take her leave. “Bye.”

“Seriously though,” Mr. Stark says, and she turns 180 degrees, continuing her walking backwards. “You can still apply to the September Foundation even if you’re at - ugh, uh, excuse me - Columbia. Ahem. Lots of grants to go around if you have a project or proposal to use it for.”

Annabeth doesn’t know whether it’s a smile or a frown that’s building up to form on her lips but she makes a conscious effort to give somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of the former. “I’m aware,” she says, hand reaching behind her to open the door she’s reached. “But life’s busy and that application’s from a different time.” She steps out of the house, remaining barely in their field of vision. 

“Regardless - it’s a conflict of interest and all, isn’t it?” There’s half a wave and brief goodbyes from the older couple before the door shuts.

Later, she’ll vaguely wonder exactly who it was that they were preparing a meal for. Vaguely, because her brain will fill in the name ‘Wilson’ and then chalk the rest of them up to being other random members of the Avenger.

She’ll do all of this later, instead of now, when said guests are pulling up to the Potts-Stark house just as she leaves. Because they may see her - one of them thinking ‘who’s that?’ and another thinking “so that’s the babysitter’ and yet another thinking something just in between - but she doesn’t see them; not now, anyhow. Because she’s busy. 

And because she might just be slightly more distracted than her everyday-ADHD-self, stuck in memories and expired ideas of a different time and what-ifs that might just be able to become reality someday.

Chapter Text

From the outside, the Potts-Stark house looks pretty regular-sized for the rich neighbourhood that it’s located in. On the inside, there are dozens of rooms - labs, supply rooms and more than a generous number of guest rooms.

Annabeth hasn’t been inside all of these rooms - really, she doesn’t even have a specific number for how many there are; the best she can go with is her own rough estimate based on how much of the house she’s covered in her months of babysitting on the premises.

She’s gathered that, of the several labs in the house, Mr. Stark spends most of his time in the one that sits just between a supposedly haunted supply closet and the edge of the open kitchen area. That is to say that even without FRIDAY’s guidance about Mr. Stark’s whereabouts, she would have found herself in this open doorway anyway.

While she can’t see him, the sounds of metal on metal coming from behind one of the main projects in the room - which looks like a giant hunk of metal in the shape of a rectangular prism the size of a full length mirror tipped on its side - give her a pretty good idea of where he is. She knocks on the doorway.

There’s a beat before he materializes, popping up from behind the project with half of his face covered in handprint-sized smudges of motor oil.

“Long time no see,” Mr. Stark greets, a rag appearing in his hands as he wipes away at a smudge on the top of the metal. “Tell Pep I was just about to-” He makes an indignant noise, head swivelling back down to the project.

“That’s for later,” he complains. There’s a scoff from someone behind the project, as Mr. Stark pops back down, hidden from her view once again.

After a beat, a different figure pops up, directly beside where Mr. Stark had done the same. He pushes his messy hair back with one hand and smirks.

“Well gosh-diggity-darn,” he says, “who do we have here?”

“Stop hitting on the babysitter, Harley,” Mr. Stark calls, still working behind the project, as Harley makes his way to its front, leaning back against it and crossing his arms. A dozen points resurface in Annabeth’s mind as she tries to make sense of this development “That’s so 1960’s stay-at-home dad.”

Harley’s smirk widens. “I’ve connected the dots.”

“No,” Annabeth says, “I’ve connected the dots.”

“You didn’t connect shit,” Harley responds immediately, his smile still wide as he delivers the response he’d clearly been hoping she would give.

“I’ve connected the dots.” Mr. Stark pops back up from behind the mass of metal with a curious look on his face, just in time for the information to finish clicking into place completely, and for Annabeth to point at him and say: “He’s potato Tony.”

“‘Potato Tony?’” Mr. Stark drawls after a beat, an are you fucking kidding me? look on his face as he turns to Harley. “You go around calling me ‘potato Tony?’” He runs a hand down his face, squinting his eyes as he seems to find a more pressing question. “You two know each other?”

“Are you kidding?” Harley asks. “‘Know each other?’ We’re fucking besties, Tony.” Annabeth smiles slightly and beckons him closer, stepping into the room as Mr. Stark takes a moment to process the development.

They meet somewhere in between, Annabeth straightening her arms and placing her hands on his corresponding shoulders. She looks him up and down purposefully. “This is unexceptable,” she deadpans.

“My existence?” he asks hopefully, both of his hands tucked into his pockets. She smiles genuinely, pulling him into a hug.

“You know you’re not allowed to be taller than me, right?” He’s not quite there yet but their height difference is getting smaller and smaller every time she sees him. (Even though he’s a ways away from reaching her height, after the dramatic growth spurt that the Blip had provided him in Annabeth’s eyes, she doesn’t think she’s being overly dramatic.)

“That sounds suspiciously like a you-problem,” he says, before the hug ends, both of them pulling away. “And you know I deal exclusively in me-problems, him-problems, and on-fire-problems.”

“Then you better get back over here and hold this,” Mr. Stark says, once again out of Annabeth’s field of vision behind the project. Harley moves back and leans over the metal, his hands moving rapidly. “Not that I don’t enjoy watching the two of you being all buddy-buddy.”

Harley ignores him completely. “I can’t believe this. Annabeth Chase becomes a babysitter and Morgs starts being all ‘Annie this, Annie that’ at the same time?” He shakes his head. “And I don’t see it?”

“So you two really know each other? I only ask seeing as neither of you have ever cared to mention anything.”

“He’s lying, Annabeth,” Harley calls, and Annabeth doesn’t have to work hard to imagine the smirk on his lips, “I sing your praises everywhere I go - including this mess of a house.”

“I regret to inform you that the only reason I’m not kicking you out right the fuck now is that this is a two-man job.”

“Oh, shut up,” Harley says, flopping further onto the metal, his head disappearing from Annabeth’s view. “Everyone in this house loves me.” A beat. “Right about now is when you’re supposed to say ‘preach!’ Annabeth.” Something between a clang and a bang sounds from the other side of Harley’s figure intensely.

“Preach,” Annabeth replies dutifully in a monotone.

Another noise - this one mostly resembling a clink - can be heard resonating around the room, followed by two clangs and a miniature boom. There are two simultaneous ‘uuh’s. A minute of silence follows as Annabeth waits patiently (sike- her hands execute involuntary jazz hands out of sight, her head bobbing along to a jazz number she can’t name now and will probably never be able to in the future, either) until both the mechanics step away from the project with half-nods of approval.

This lab experience is largely tame compared to the forge at CHB or even just cabin nine. There, when something is in danger of catching on fire, it does catch on fire. Annabeth can’t decide whether or not she should have the cabin invest in some godly fire insurance or if that would just act as an invitation to start purposefully lighting things on fire - an activity that’s only allowed during fireworks on the beach under very specific conditions.

Mr. Stark switches between glancing at Harley and at her for a moment, as Harley scrubs his hands of the motor oil in a nearby sink.

“So it’s settled - as if it already hadn’t been - Annabeth, you’re invited to Thanksgiving dinner. It’s here, on Thanksgiving day, around dinner time - as one would expect,” Mr. Stark continues. He catches her look. “We’ve been talking about inviting you for a while - Morgan seriously goes on about you when you’re not here, by the way - and now the bonus is that Harley’ll have a babysitter at the infant’s table.” Mr. Stark smiles encouragingly in his direction, to which Harley responds with a bow.

“Thanks for the offer and all but she’s got other plans,” Harley says once he straightens, a fake apologetic look on his face. “And so do I.”

Annabeth gives him an unimpressed look. “We do?”

“Yes, indeed, we do,” Harley says, approximately at the same time that Mr. Stark tells him: “Uh-uh, Thanksgiving dinner is mandatory for you.” 

Harley plops down on the ground - criss-cross-apple-sauce - and reaches behind the metal with one hand, which returns clasping his oversized backpack. He pulls out what might have once been a crisp envelope but now is a half-crumpled scrap of bright red paper and cardstock.

Flicking his wrist, he throws the invitation over to her like a frisbee.

“No-can-do, Tony,” he says, “I got a formal invitation and everything.” Said invitation is addressed not to Harley but to CHB - where he probably snatched it from - and is from their sister - or maybe cousin is more appropriate - camp. A friendly invitation to get themselves to the SF Bay Area for the Thursday to Sunday long weekend. Didn’t she have some input in scheduling this meeting - this essential, important, life-and-death planning meeting? Yes, yes indeed she did.

Regardless - Harley had time to make it to Long Island before coming here and didn’t have time to call her? The heck’s up with that?

She slips the invitation back into the envelope and tilts her head at him. “Weren’t you supposed to call me when you were coming back to the city?”

“Uuuhh,” Harley says, making a face that says psht, let’s not fixate on such things. “Hey, Tony, weren’t you about to be mad at me for something? Let’s go back to that.” He puts his hand out for the invitation with half of an eyebrow raise and Annabeth maintains steady eye-contact as she tucks it into her back pocket. He clutches at his heart as Mr. Stark continues saying something about how Harley keeps missing Thanksgiving dinners.

“Come on, I’ve made it to a good more-than-50% of your Thanksgiving dinners,” he complains.

“If you miss this one, it’ll be a blanket 50%.”

“You can round a 0.5 up to a 1!” he defends.

Mr. Stark blinks at him, revisiting his are you fucking kidding me? face. Annabeth’s mortal flip phone rings before her employer can vocalize his expression; it’s a call from Reyna, which means it can only be trouble. 

Reyna has an N-phone and she uses it consistently - unlike some of Annabeth’s other half-blood friends. The last time Reyna had called via mortal channels, she’d been stuck in the middle of the desert, her N-phone smashed by the Hellhound that had teleported her to said middle of nowhere and then promptly been skewered by her twin daggers.

“I have to take this - and I’m gonna get going any- oh, nearly forgot, you’re wanted in the kitchen area,” she says, before turning to Harley and threatening: “Next time, call me before you get back to the city.”

Harley salutes as Tony exchanges goodbyes and Annabeth disappears into the many twists of the Potts-Stark house’s hallway system.

Tony’s floors are oddly comfortable, Harley realizes, and he stretches out his limbs and makes himself horizontal, resting his head on one bent arm so he can still make eye contact with Tony.

Tony leans back too, against the table behind him rather than the floor, and crosses his arms slowly.

“How am I supposed to know that you have friends when you don’t tell me about them?” he says, doing succinct quotation marks on the last word.

“Hm,” Harley says shortly, turning his head to the side and blinking so rapidly that he might have to stop pretty soon. “Maybe you just don’t pay enough attention.” And then he actually has to stop, because he made something get stuck in his eye and wow, that’s dedication to the craft right there. Tony doesn’t seem to agree if the look on his face is anything to go by.

Once Harley succeeds in saving his eyesight, Tony says: “All right, shimmy over here now so we can finish fixing this thing.”

“Uuhh-”

“Uh-uh, you dragged this thing here from the Cold War, you have to help,” Tony says. Harley obliges, using his legs to propel him across the floor, not missing Tony’s wrinkled nose as he finishes his slide.

“I’ll have you know that this was in perfect working order until at least last week.” And at most, this morning, when Harley had swung by CHB to find that his no-longer-work-in-progress had once again become a work-in-progress.

“I thought you just pulled this out of a dumpster somewhere,” Tony comments. “Now shut up and tell me how things are at M.I.T. while you’re still in the city.”

They’d originally planned to meet in New Rome, but when Annabeth arrived, she’d been informed that they were now congregating in the Senate for the meeting. She was also assured that the Senate wouldn’t actually be in session. (The session was being held on Friday, not Thursday, after the meeting consisting of most of the CHB war council, Praetors Frank and Hazel, and some other high-ranking members of CJ took place.)

The meeting dispersed in the evening, after nearly 12 hours of discussion - at which point they were invited to eat anywhere they wanted except for some carefully outlined restrictions.

Annabeth spots Harley at the very edge of one of these restricted areas, on his mortal phone of all things. She makes her way over with half of a disapproving look on her face, which Harley only seems to spot when she's four feet away from him. 

He makes a noise - which isn’t indignant but something close to it.

“Yeah, no, I’m fine, Tony,” he says into the phone, looking her in the eyes as he continues: “Annabeth’s very presence just sometimes scares the shit out of me.”

Sometimes, she mouths. He smirks, drawing a finger across his throat and letting his head fall to one side.

“What for?” he asks. Annabeth can usually faintly hear people on the other line of someone else’s phone call - especially when she’s four feet away. But Harley’s phone - like hers - has its volume turned down considerably because of the low-level hearing enhancement that half-bloods have in comparison to mortals.

“Whoopsie-daisy. She actually can’t.” She blinks at him once, unimpressed with him answering a question for her. “Yeah, she feels the same way- she’s making a face.” He transitions to his ‘waiting patiently’ face as Tony presumably speaks.

“She’s supes busy until, like, late Saturday,” he says, which is true. “I’ll babysit. Yeah. I’m getting back tomorrow night-” News to Annabeth, certainly “-that’s right- now, who was it that was complaining unnecessarily about me missing the long weekend?” Harley gives her a face that says I’ll explain later.

“Yeah, I know, I know, you love me to pieces, you miss me horribly, it’s old news really.” His face breaks into a smile as a laugh escapes from his lips. Annabeth smiles unconsciously. You can’t not smile when Harley gets like this - an unexpected joy comes across the face of everyone involved.

“Yeah. Bye.” Harley smirks at Annabeth as he slips his phone into his back pocket. “So Tony says ‘hi.’” He nods along with his words and only a second of silence passes before he answers her unspoken question.

“Yeah, yeah. I’m taking the Grey Sisters express back to the city,” he says. “I’m not really required at the Senate session, you know?” Annabeth links her arm through his offered elbow.

“Only the Senators are required,” she says. “Doesn’t mean the rest of us aren’t needed.” Harley raises half an eyebrow.

“D’you think I should stay?”

“Not what I’m saying- also not the point.” She bumps his shoulder as they walk. “What were you gonna do? Just sneak out after dark?”

“You’re not the only one allowed to be a little mysterious,” he defends, looking off towards the sky dramatically.

“A lot mysterious,” she corrects. He smiles. Something explodes to the left of them.

“Whoops?” calls back a voice beside the once-again dimly lit area as Annabeth returns her weapon to its sheath. Harley re-offers his arm and she takes it once again. They continue walking.

“So, since Morgs can call you ‘Annie’ and I’m undoubtedly her favourite, can I-”

“No.”

Chapter Text

They arrive at the four-storey building exactly on time, and the way Mr. Hogan gets them there is Annabeth’s absolute favourite. He drives safely, conversing with Morgan the entire time - Annabeth occasionally chiming in when appropriate - but something about the way he handles the car tells her that he could drive like an absolute madman if and when the opportunity presented itself.

The facility itself isn’t overly impressive for an SI site - and Annabeth knows that it isn’t supposed to be. But, for the purposes of today, it’s suitably grand.

That’s because, for today, it’s a substitute for the Potts-Stark house in Queens while it’s getting worked on. Apparently, even billionaires aren’t immune to termites. The house is getting tented today of all things.

Mr. Stark’s tone as he had relayed the situation to her yesterday afternoon had been exasperated beyond repair. Annabeth hadn’t been overly sympathetic - you can’t really blame her, she’d been very much in the middle of beating someone up (in a very friendly manner, as part of their routine sparring) when her phone had rung.

The skywalk connecting the third floors of the two largely independent sides of the property stands out to her as she exits the car with Morgan in tow. It’s made completely of glass from what Annabeth can see, in stark opposition to the concrete composition of the rest of the building - the entirety of which they have to themselves.

She shoulders her backpack and goes to offer to carry Morgan’s things, before realising that the younger girl has already started to pull them from the car. Mr. Hogan notices too and makes a complaint but Morgan shakes her head animatedly, putting her arm through the handles of the duffle bag-esque bag.

“If you say so, boss,” he offers.

“I say so!” she replies happily. “Bye Happy!”

“Thanks, Mr. Hogan.”

“Call me Happy, kid,” he says. “I’m not your boss.” Annabeth makes a note-to-self to consider it as she and Morgan move towards the entrance. Annabeth taps the access card she’d been given and holds the door for Morgan as the younger girl shuffles in. The car doesn’t pull away until they’re fully inside the building and the door has been shut behind them.

“You have any ideas for the day, Morgan?” She lights up, even as Annabeth takes the duffle bag from her and swings it over the same shoulder that’s carrying her backpack. It’s safe to say that she has a few.

Each one of her ideas is better than the last in one way or another, but they eventually go with what might be the simplest.

Apparently, Mr. Stark had shipped out a half a dozen lego sets and another half a dozen puzzles - which range from consisting of a hundred pieces to twelve hundred pieces. They end up choosing one that has a moderate eight hundred and fifty pieces, which they promptly dump out of the box and onto a large table.

It’s a costum one, no doubt, which is what originally drew them to it in the first place. It’s an objectively horribly shot picture of Harley giving the camera finger guns, while a Morgan that Annabeth assumes is somewhere around four years old tries to photobomb him with a t-pose. In the foreground, a figure clothed completely in fuzzy, bright green clothing - down to the fully-green elf hat sitting on his head - is sprawled face-down on the floor.

Morgan challenges her not to start with the edge pieces. And Annabeth is not one to refuse such challenges. (Or any challenges, really.) So they start with the green monument to existential crisis on the ground - “Oh, that’s Petey! He’s taking me ice-skating on Wednesday!” - and collect all the even vaguely green-tinted pieces in sight.

They’re both perched on stools within a minute or two, and some time later (don’t ask Annabeth how long, because she couldn’t tell you if her life was on the line - twenty minutes? four hours? the length of time it takes for the Jackson-Blofis residence to decide what movie to watch next when they’re assembled for movie night? it’s all po-tay-to, po-tah-to for her) the subject of Morgan’s upcoming birthday is brought to the forefront of the conversation.

Morgan is decidedly very, very excited about it. And Morgan’s excitement is incredibly contagious. She’s turning six for goodness’ sake!

“Do you have any good plans?” Annabeth asks, trying to find the remnants of the elf hat that they had apparently missed in their collection of the green pieces. Morgan nods confidently.

“A gigantic party! I’m inviting everyone!!” Her eyes light up. “You too, Annabeth! Mommy said she was gonna tell you- has she told you?”

Annabeth shakes her head. Morgan buzzes.

“I can tell you!” And she does. In great detail - so much detail that Annabeth starts wondering how much she’s been overlooking birthday plans.

(Honestly, she’s just in a constant back-and-forth between knowing that she’s not going to survive for very long, which makes looking forward to birthday plans pointless, and being so extremely fucking annoyed that the fucking gods have made this her fucking life that she wants to celebrate in an over-the-top way just to piss them off.)

She knows that Camp Jupiter is hosting a big birthday party for Hazel - Hades, Annabeth is invited. (She has a certain degree of doubt about whether or not she’ll be able to make it. The 17th is dangerously close to the winter solstice.) But, isn’t Thalia’s birthday also coming up?

Technically-immortal people don’t really care about age anymore, but… Annabeth can still throw her a party, right? (And the 22nd is the day after the solstice, so, at worst, everyone will just be slightly beat up if something happens this year. Doesn’t mean they can’t have fun. (Shit, what if it does?))

Eventually, the topic of the conversation shifts - as it often does when the individuals involved are an almost-six-year-old and a girl that might as well be a poster-child for ADHD.

Annabeth realizes rather quickly that she’s never been so thankful for windows in her entire life. There’s only one in the room they’re in, but it’s all she needs, even if it’s more than half obscured by shutters. That’s also probably for the best in this case.

That way, she can see the half dozen people dressed in SWAT uniforms pulled straight from a t.v. show she doesn’t remember seeing exiting a black van parked across from the property, but they can’t see her.

She blinks once before her eyes narrow, her brain moving at roughly sixteen thoughts a second - which is only marginally more than the ratio of thoughts to seconds elapsed within her mind regularly.

She doesn’t know what makes her first thought ‘that isn’t SWAT.’ And she doesn’t know what her mind picks out as off from such a far away distance. But it is. And it does. And she’s gotten this far by following her instincts; nothing else.

And she lets her instincts lead her now, too.

“Hey, Morgan?” she says, and the younger girl hums. “Put the puzzle pieces down for me?”

Say what you will about kids but Annabeth knows one thing about them for certain. When she tells them to do something in this voice, they always listen. And Morgan is by no means an exception to the rule. She puts the piece she’s been motioning with down and turns to Annabeth.

“Yeah?” It’s only then that Annabeth notices the distinct lack of camera-signalling red lights in the room. They’d been on a few minutes ago.

“Morgan, I’m gonna tell you something, okay?” Morgan’s eyebrows wrinkle so slightly that Annabeth thinks she might be imagining it, but the younger girl nods regardless. “There are some bad people around here, and I need you to listen closely to me for a little while.” Annabeth is an incredibly firm believer in telling kids the truth.

Morgan nods again, this one a single, short movement. “Okay.” Annabeth’s hand is already wrapping around Morgan’s wireless headphones, and Morgan doesn’t object when she puts them around the younger girl’s neck for her, only punching a strand of hair back behind her ear.

She gets another glance through the window; it’s only by luck that they enter through the other building and not this one - that or incompetence, which always works to Annabeth’s benefit. She shifts her attention to the contents of the room in the same glance. Okay. Plan time.

She feels like her movements are out of order for some reason - like she’s performing step four before her brain decides to tell her that step two is also a thing that exists. But she doesn’t let it bother her. Her brain has always been like this - and she’s not just about to mess with a system that works; she’s not about to fix something that isn’t broken.

The vent opening in the ceiling is her saviour.

“Morgan, on a scale of one to ten,” Annabeth says, “how much do you trust me?” The question keeps her busy for the second that Annabeth needs for her brain to catch up with- well, with itself, really.

“Twelve,” Morgan announces, her chin jutting out in the confidence of her answer. Annabeth smiles wide for Morgan’s benefit.

“That’s perfect.” Morgan smiles back, her confidence boosting further. “Can you put the bags in that closet for me?” She nods and sets to work. Annabeth turns away, focusing her attention on the ceiling.

There’s a surplus of screwdrivers for Annabeth to pick from, but she just uses the first that her hand lands on, using it to unscrew the firm screws of the vent cover. She pushes upwards and then slides it to the side, a countdown based on the roughest estimate she can make on how long they have before they’re reached ticks away in the back of her mind. The opening is large enough for their purposes.

She turns back as Morgan closes the closet firmly, setting her eyes back on Annabeth. “Great job, Morgan,” Annabeth says, and Morgan’s face matches her bright tone. She moves over and slides the completed sections of the puzzle back into the box with movements fluid enough to keep them from falling apart, pushing the unused ones off the table and into the box as well.

She returns the box to the stack on the bookshelf in the room, straightening things as she does. The more untouched this room looks, the better. She turns back to Morgan, making sure that there’s still a shadow of a smile on her face. She motions for Morgan to come closer and she obliges.

She bends down and Morgan wraps her arm around Annabeth’s neck without her having to ask. She walks back over to the now open vent and guides Morgan’s feet into the opening, followed by the rest of her body, until she’s completely inside, narrating the entire process.

Morgan’s hands fall away from her neck as she readjusts herself in the vent, looking down at Annabeth. “Morgan,” she says, “I have a job for you, okay?”

She can let this situation play out a dozen ways - in most of them, she’ll probably figure out a way to come out on top. But that’s not what’s important right now - now that she’s looking at Morgan’s face, which has still managed to remain free of fear.

And she knows for a fact that there’s one important thing in this specific moment. She can count on one hand the number of minors that she knows without some form of significant trauma stemming from a young age. Gods know she’s not gonna let Morgan stop being one of those minors. Because, right now, Annabeth has the power to stop that from happening.

“Okay,” Morgan says.

Annabeth reaches to a nearby table and grabs a tool that she recognizes - one that she saw in Mr. Stark’s lab maybe a month and a half ago, when Morgan had been asking questions about his projects until her mouth had gone dry, FRIDAY answering nearly all of them without reservation.

Morgan might recognize it too, but Annabeth doesn’t ask.

“This is a taser,” Annabeth says, showing her the buttons and letting Morgan wrap both hands around it. In actuality, it’s a device that delivers a wide-range taser-like electricity. It’d tase a whole room; and that’s exactly what Annabeth wants right now. She slides the vent cover over, until there’s only a one inch gap remaining - enough for the relevant part of the device to peek through.

“If someone comes back into this room that isn’t me,” she says, her head moving vaguely in a nodding motion, “I want you to press this button. Teach any bad guys who come inside without permission a lesson, y’know?” She mirrors Harley’s smirk to the best of her ability - or maybe it’s a combination of his and someone else’s. Morgan smirks back, and Annabeth lets out an internal breath of relief. She’s gonna make this work.

“Slip your headphones on for me - with the noise cancelling on.” Morgan nods and brings her headphones to rest over her ears, Annabeth only satisfied when she sees the dim light that signals the noise-cancelling feature is active. SI noise cancelling tech is the best in the business.

She puts a finger to her lips and Morgan nods. She backs away and the last she sees of Morgan, the younger girl is pointing the device directly at the ground, in the same way Annabeth had told her to.

There’s a brief moment where Annabeth tries to remember definitively if the other rooms in the building had their doors open or closed.

Open.

Annabeth walks out the doorway with time still ticking away in her mental countdown.

The hallways of this facility are basically as twisty as the ones in the Potts-Stark house, and it gives Annabeth a weird sense of familiarity that she thinks is misplaced.

She needs to call them.

It’s a thought that’s been echoing in her head for a minute or two now - since she caught sight of the men. There’s no doubt that this has to do with their work - whether it’s the superhero work or SI is really more of a question - just like there’s no doubt that this should be dealt with by one of those superheroes.

She’s not completely sure why she hasn’t yet. She half-curses her demigod ways of fending for herself. Only half. Because she’s lived to tell the tale so far, hasn’t she?

She spots a duo of them around the corner, just in time to stop herself from being spotted. They don’t have weapons drawn yet. So stupid. In the second she takes to roll out her shoulders and stretch some last minute muscles, she wonders if she should really be upset that they’re at least partially idiots.

She stumbles out into the hall, looking around frantically until she ‘spots them.’

“Oh thank goodness,” she says, leaning into it probably a bit too much. Tone it down, Annabeth. She half-heartedly throws her hands up in the universal gesture of ‘I mean you no harm’ just before their hands go to their holsters. “What’s going on? Are we in danger?”

“Don’t worry, Miss,” Full-of-shit #1 says, putting out a hand out to calm her. “We’ll get you to safety, just lead us to the other occupants.” His voice is calm and assuring - or, rather, it would be if Annabeth couldn’t see through it like a paper-thin excuse for getting out of canoeing lessons.

She nods shakily, turning and moving back down the hall they saw her come from. She moves at a gradual pace, continuing even as she hears the faint click signalling the opening of holsters. The skin behind her neck pricks unnecessarily in warning. She makes it four steps (putting her directly in front of full-of-shit #1 and within a good distance of #2) before she makes her move, plowing her elbow into the position of his face, probably breaking his nose if the noise she hears is any indication.

She confirms her earlier suspicions when her turning puts them back within her field of vision. Both of them have their guns drawn, full-of-shit #2’s halfway to her face as #1’s knees hit the ground, his own gun clattering out of his hand.

Full-of-shit #2’s head collides with a vase of flowers Annabeth swipes from the table a few feet away. (The facility is littered with them, from the first floor all the way to the fourth, the interior designers clearly not discriminating between hallways. Every. Single. Hallway has a table topped with a vase of flowers.)

(She half-hopes that they’re not artifacts or something. Though, she could barely give less shits if they were otherwise very expensive.)

This particular vase is glass, knocking #2 out rather easily. (It’s thick too, only cracked from the contact instead of fully shattered.) Full-of-shit #1, however, is not unconscious - only understandably disoriented.

He calls her a handful of words that Annabeth thinks warrant more than the kick to the head that knocks him out.

A fraction of a second passes before Annabeth decides to kick the guns (both of which are now out of the men’s hands) behind the floor length curtains on the opposite wall of the hallway. If there are only two here, they probably split up. They probably realised how stupid it was that they only entered through one of the buildings.

She continues moving - now in the direction the men had come from - while being careful to avoid the blood starting to pool slightly at her feet. She’d be partially concerned if she didn’t know from experience that nosebleeds bleed a lot - first and second-hand experience.

It hits her then. Can a regular young woman with assumed above-average strength knock out two men like that? Fuck. She really needs to read up more on how a mortal would fare in these types of situations. (Can she find literature on that at the public library?)

Adrenaline. She’ll chalk it up to adrenaline. Don’t blow it all now, Annabeth.

Chapter Text

Annabeth arrives at the next hallway intersection and promptly turns right, moving all the way down the stretch of hallway and knocking a vase over - in what she intends to be viewed as an accidental way - before she does a 180 and instead goes left - the direction that the rough floor plan in her mind tells her will take her to the skywalk.

It takes her a minute until she catches sight of the glass interior of the skywalk - and by then, two more full-of-shits have made it across to the building she’s in. They spot her before she’d wanted them to and she’s pretty sure she falters in her oh my, I’m so relieved you’re here face.

Or maybe these two are just more aggressive, because they point their guns at Annabeth right away, her hands going up in the same way as before, though less half-heartedly.

“Is something wrong?” she asks, a wide-eyed and childish fear coating her voice. “Are we in danger?” She keeps her feet still and in place, letting them move forward towards her instead of approaching them herself. She can’t tell if she’s blown it already. Percy tells her that people can’t just ignore her terminator walk once they’ve seen it - they either shit their pants or pull out their swords.

Both of their guns make that clicking noise that the few police procedural shows Annabeth has seen (by Rachel’s insistence, of all people) tell her means that they’ve cocked their guns, and that they’re ready to fire.

Fuck. She’s definitely blown the scared-little-girl act now. Come on, then. Just a step or two closer, and she’ll be able to throw that cover into the dumpster without a second’s delay.

“Turn around,” Aggressive-woman says, motioning with her gun - which Annabeth can identify only as not being one of those bulky ones that shoot really fast, and nothing further. (Though, now that she thinks of it, it half-resembles the shape of one that this absolute fucking idiot used to try and mug her last year. Plus, they’re both jet black.)

“I don’t understand,” Annabeth tries. Aggressive-woman’s male counterpart takes a step forward and nearly shoves his gun in her face.

“Turn around.”

(Okay. So.)

(Annabeth fucking hates guns.)

(First off, so fucking unreliable, from what she knows off of, like, three and a half unfinished episodes of Blue Bloods.)

(Not to mention that she prefers melee weapons - bladed, edged, she doesn’t really care in quickly-heating-up situations - to ranged weapons. No disrespect to the Hunters of Artemis or cabin seven or anything. The thing is that, really, compared to other demigods she knows - excluding some individuals, most notably her boyfriend - Annabeth’s aim might as well be shit when you take into account what she needs it to be. Whatever the case, even flexible weapons rank higher than range ones in Annabeth’s personal armory.)

(She’ll digress.)

(But Annabeth seriously fucking hates guns.)

(She especially fucking hates guns when assholes are pushing them in her face and the barrel is staring down at her like nothing she’s ever seen before.)

(She knows how guns work - she has a full schematic of the trigger system of a generic gun on her laptop in the midst of the hundreds of other blueprints and things on there.)

(You can catch arrows; you can catch blades. You can’t catch bullets. Annabeth can’t, at least.)

(Guns may be seriously unreliable compared to her armory, but you can count on them to be fucking intimidating when you’re staring down the barrel of one, no matter what half-brained asshole is on the other end. Even that absolute fucking idiot of a mugger from a while back would’ve been intimidating if he’d shoved his gun in her face the way this one does. That’s apparently another thing she can attest to personally.)

(What, do the fates think that she doesn’t have enough material for two memoirs, a full-length stand-up comedy special, and a six month long interview tour already?)

So, if she falters for a moment, just staring at the black of the barrel with her enhanced vision, who cares? It’s all part of the act, isn’t it?

“Okay, okay,” she says, once she manages to find herself back at 100% inside her mind. 

“Move. Now.” And she thinks that he deserves it when she ducks and extends her leg backwards towards the general area where the sun doesn't shine as she goes to turn. The force and her well-planned angle sends aggressive-man toppling backwards into aggressive-woman, Annabeth barely managing to wrap her hand around his wrist and free him of his weapon before it does.

So what if she probably uses a little more force than the stronger-than-average mortal would’ve in the situation?

Stop it, Annabeth!

Three can be adrenaline; any more and you’ll screw everything up - for more than just yourself.

Annabeth sobers herself up rather quickly in the half second that it takes for her to throw the gun down and for aggressive-man and aggressive-woman to hit the ground. Just in time, really. Just in time for Annabeth to catch sight of the two other uniformed men coming down the skywalk. Her only consolation is that they might not have noticed her yet.

She lets her instincts carry her feet, trying to figure out whether or not this was as stupid of a mistake as it’s beginning to look like. Creating a trail for the enemy to follow is a long-term thing - it won’t really be the best solution if she keeps running into the assholes.

(Then again, it would take her a while to think of one of her ideas that didn’t seem at least partially stupid as she was executing them. Second-guessing might as well be her middle name if she didn’t already have two of those.)

Said instincts lead one of her feet directly into the wrist of aggressive-woman, keeping in mind the fact that she needs to tone down her strength as she frees the older woman of her firearm and kicks it far enough away that she doesn’t have to concern herself with it anymore. Aggressive-woman grunts and lets out a swear, bringing her other arm around to grasp at Annabeth’s stationary foot.

She evades the movement, repositioning herself in time for aggressive-man to return himself to a standing position. He swings for her face, missing as Annabeth leans back out of the way. Annabeth only needs to lean a little to miss it, but she goes farther, grabbing his fist with both of her hands and using it as a counterweight. Extending her leg once again, she kicks him square in the gut; his backward movement is enough to bring her back to a vertical position as he stumbles to regain his footing.

She can hear the two men’s footsteps getting closer around the corner - a corner that she remembers internally criticizing earlier as useless in terms of the floor-plan but which she’s now grateful for.

Aggressive-woman is back on her feet now too, and she’s more pissed than aggressive by what Annabeth can hear from behind her. She doesn’t turn around, keeping her eyes on aggressive-man - because she knows what aggressive-woman is gonna do now. It’s probably not exactly what Annabeth would do in this situation, but, hey, people don’t usually do things the way Annabeth does.

So, long story short, it’s not a surprise when aggressive-woman comes at her from behind, wrapping her arms around Annabeth and her lowered arms to restrain her movements. Her grip is strong - for a mortal - and Annabeth discovers that in her first test of said grip. She only needs the first test.

As aggressive-man scans around for his gun, Annabeth delivers one toned-down elbow strike to aggressive-woman’s stomach, and then another to her face, releasing herself from the hold. The woman hits the ground hard, which - in addition to at least 60% of a broken nose - knocks her out in time for aggressive-man to barrel into Annabeth, making them both collide with the wall.

Annabeth can’t tell if this is an idiot or amature move. Seeing as there’s another glass-vase-equipped table right beside her.

No longer worried about the sound she’ll make because of the racket that’s just sounded, Annabeth participates in the events that make this idiot’s head collide with the vase, the water from inside splashing over him as he falls, unconscious. Annabeth sets the vase back on the table, not even noticing as her hand straightens one of the flowers as it brushes against its stem.

Before she can start making her way anywhere, the two men make their grand appearance. They’ve clearly just finished running the final stretch of the skywalk, because they come to a sudden stop when they see Annabeth, who has just stepped over the collapsed body of their friend or teammate or co-worker or whatever.

Their guns extend, and Annabeth reflects briefly on the wisdom of a phrase she heard in a movie trailer once.

Charge a guy with a gun, run from a guy with a knife.

Kind of iffy logic in Annabeth’s daily life/experience, but the basics still hold.

So Annabeth takes the opportunity presented by these two idiots not even bothering to take the safety off their guns or whatever they’re supposed to do, and gets as close as she physically can, as fast as she can, without ramming through them. And she then once again reminds herself that she should at least try not to put up a flashing sign indicating that she’s not a mortal.

Maybe not reveal that she’s half-not-fucking-human before she gets a chance to really arrange how she wants to fake her death?

(She thinks really dying would be the best way to go about it. ‘Cause, you know - best way to make someone believe you’re dead? Actually die. Ten out of ten, best solution.)

(‘Cause it’s a fool-proof plan.)

She gets herself between the two men, close enough that their guns are no longer pointing at her, and are instead pointing past her.

Annabeth elbows one of these outstretched hands (specifically that of idiot #1, who actually has a head of stunning red-brown hair) right in the wrist and then elbows the gun out of said hand, in two back to back movements. She reaches her foot past idiot #1’s right foot, and then brings it back towards herself in a sudden motion, kicking him in the back of the shin, at the same time that her hands grasp around idiot #2’s hands - which are still in possession of his gun.

Idiot #1 stumbles forward from the attack, conveniently clearing the immediate area enough for Annabeth to grapple with idiot #2 comfortably. He goes for her abdomen immediately with one knee, making Annabeth twist out of the way. She uses the momentum of the movement to dislodge one of his hands from the gun, which makes it considerably easier to do the same with the other, before she takes half a step back and yeets the weapon away.

She knows she’s too far away and moves to close the distance once again - to knock idiot #2 unconscious as quickly as she can so that she can deal with-

Idiot #1 runs into her from behind, sending both of them into the skywalk and onto the floor. 

The floor is very well made - it’s glass, see-through but thick and durable if she recognizes this type of glass properly as what it is, and the design on it doesn’t interfere with it’s transparentness, only acting as an elegant counterbal-

Right. Idiot #1. She should probably focus.

She lands on her back, which provides her with a much easier and all-around simpler solution as opposed to what she would’ve needed to do had she landed the other way - or, rather, any other way. What is this solution?

As idiot #1 moves to grab hold of her wrists, she uses the newfound space between them to kick him, hard, right in the solar plexus, while being mindful of the fact that too many broken ribs might raise a more than favourable amount of suspicion.

The kick sends him backwards hard and she stands, disoriented for a brief moment, and moves to the other side of him, trying to get off of the skywalk and back to Morgan now that she’s planted enough false leads to buy them some time.

Idiot the first fails to stir in such a way that indicates that his landing must have knocked him out cold. That’s some luck compared to the types of hands Annabeth is usually dealt.

She makes it past idiot #1 but not out of the skywalk, intercepted by idiot #2 before she’s able to step back onto not-see-through ground. He rams into her from the side, slamming her into the glass hard. Which hurts.

Managing to release one of her hands, she punches him in the face without remorse. That’s probably what sets him off, if she really thinks about it.

He grunts, shaking his head out once before he pulls out the colourful language. And then, he actually pulls out a knife - one that has a black, edged blade.

Is it weird that her first thought is, ‘finally, a knife?’ It’s just… familiar, she guesses?

And the familiarity continues as idiot #2 (who she briefly considers renaming because of his blatant anger management issue) tries to stab her. Yay? And he goes straight for the face, too - no preamble or anything.

She ducks under the blow, thankfully missing it - ‘cause, y’know, she rather likes her head, skull, brain, etc. as it is. And if the way the knife goes through the glass behind her head is anything to go by, idiot #2 put a hell of a lot of force behind it.

She can’t tell if he even tries to get the knife out, kicking him away from her before she can assess that part of the situation. With the distance between them and no visible threat of range weapons to bother her, Annabeth splits her attention between the only standing idiot and the knife embedded in the glass now behind her.

Before her brain decides to tell her why, she’s following it’s instructions to help the knife break through the glass. Deciding that this probably wouldn’t be a one-easy-blow deal for the regular mortal, Annabeth says, what the Hades, and decides to help the knife through with a good shake-shake-push combination.

It works. And just in time for idiot #2 - now with confirmed anger management issues - to barrel into her, yet again. Like, come one, can’t this be just a tad more original?

Long story short, she has to try a little more to not fall three storeys than she has to on a regular basis - seeing as, regularly, she isn’t half outside of a skywalk, the remnants of a broken pane of glass poking into her backside as idiot the second tries very hard indeed to push her out of said skywalk. Or, at least that’s what she thinks he’s doing. Maybe he’s just caught up in the moment or something?

She kicks him backwards yet again, and returns to a vertical position - which takes just about the same length of time as idiot #2 takes to start charging again and- okay, what the Hades is your problem dude?

She conveys this question by punching him in the jaw as he charges - which only deters him slightly, his momentum carrying him forward towards his intended target: Annabeth. And she once again finds herself with shards of glass digging into her skin - which is in her top ten most annoying fucking things ever list, by the way.

And now she’s just pissed.

She considers her options. Briefly.

He punches her in the gut as he seems to regain his head from her hit to his jaw. The punch itself stings but is slightly overshadowed by the fact that it loosens her stance, forcing her to grab onto the glass - the shards of the remaining glass really - with one of her arms in order to replant her feet on the ground. Which. Like, ow.

And now she’s just… really pissed. Like.

A lot.

She kicks him again. (Admittedly, it’s more difficult this time, especially since whenever you push on something, it pushes back on you with the same strength and so, with this in mind, Annabeth has to secure her position of not flying out the building before she can deliver said kick.) Oh, how the cycle of violence continues.

This time is also difficult in another way. Though idiot the second’s movements aren’t in any respect. He charges like a guy who seriously needs therapy and/or improv classes as he had the previous times.

No. The difference is that this time, Annabeth grabs one of the arms he has outstretched with the aim to push her, and she pulls. Hard. And gives a mental goodbye as his momentum, with Annabeth’s healthy addition, carries him out of the skywalk through the mostly-missing pane of glass.

Thanks so much for fucking off, she thinks in an interior voice of honey, and have an excellent day!

Sure, she finds comfort in the fact that a fall from the third storey can only break your legs at most (most of the time), but really, she finds more comfort in the fact that idiot the second has taken his well-deserved leave from this situation.

She lets out a breath, and with it, some emotions that she can’t identify.

She proceeds to scamper back to Morgan’s location, not missing the fact that the van still parked across the street is not anywhere near empty. She puts it not completely out of her mind, but, instead, to the side. And she doesn’t let it distract her from knocking over this and that, and making crooked a couple other things, in such a way that’s designed to lead these other assholes in exactly the wrong directions.

Chapter Text

When she arrives at the open door, she enters with her hands first, wiggling them within sight and then smiling as she enters all the way. She gives Morgan a thumbs up and the girl smiles back at her as Annabeth moves the vent cover completely out of the way.

She mimes pushing back the headphones off of one ear as she holds out her other hand for the taser device. Morgan obliges on both counts. Annabeth places the device in the vent, past where she’s pushed the vent cover, and puts a finger to her lips before she asks Morgan to speak in a whisper.

“Keep your fingers safe, Morgan,” Annabeth warns, “‘cause I'm coming up there.” Morgan retracts her hands and Annabeth deliberates for a second before asking the younger girls to close her eyes, too. She does.

Annabeth starts her ascent, not climbing so much as pulling herself up, and pulling herself up, and pulling herself up, until she can place her feet on the part of the vent at Morgan’s horizontal level, her own body taking up space in the portion of the vent that goes directly upwards.

“Okay, Morgan, I’m gonna pull you up with me now,” she starts, and continues her quieter-than-usual narration until Morgan’s hands are clasped around her neck, and her legs hanging on at waist-level; Annabeth slides the vent cover back into place with her foot. This narration continues further as Annabeth begins moving upwards once again, not so much describing her movements as simply filling the silence.

She comes to a stop when she catches sight of another horizontal vent opening like the kind the Morgan had been waiting in, though this one has a tubular metal bar going across it, essentially blocking entry. Annabeth is very thankful for this metal bar, along with the metal bar going across the rest of the vent above her, which also serves to prevent entry.

Why?

Because Annabeth would have otherwise had to hold on to the bare walls of the vent to prevent them from falling. Now, all she has to do is hook her legs around the metal bar in front of her - which fits not too uncomfortably in the crook of her knees - and clasp one hand around the metal bar above her.

Much easier.

“Morgan,” she says quietly, “you wanna listen to your bored playlist?” There’s a beat. Part of Annabeth worries that it’s not enough - that a positive attitude doesn't do shit when you're five years old and away from your loving parents and ‘bad guys’ are in the building, doing surely nothing good.

“Can I listen to my party playlist instead?” Morgan whispers. Fucking absolutely, sweetheart.

“Sure,” Annabeth says. Once Morgan has done the necessary turning of the dials on the side of her headphones, and they’re slipped back over top of her ears, Annabeth does another check that the light signalling the noise cancelling function is still on. It is. Time to move on to what she probably should've done a while ago.

Morgan is tipped forward and settled against Annabath’s chest, so she doesn't have to worry that removing her hand from the younger girl's backside will let her fall as she reaches into one of her many pockets to pull out her flip phone. She rests part of her arm on Morgan’s, just to make sure that the younger girl knows that Annabeth’s still there.

She doesn’t have time to decide which of Morgan’s parents she should call, her attention absorbed straight away by all-caps once she catches sight of her contacts list. It probably wouldn't have occurred to her that an AI would have a phone number before she’d met FRIDAY. But this AI does.

She calls.

Then she remembers that she should probably turn off the ringer of her phone. She does.

FRIDAY picks up after three short beeps, which Annabeth has to assume is the norm, as she's never called this number before.

“Patching you through now,” is the only response that comes through - in FRIDAY’s distinct voice - followed - very annoyingly, in her not-so-humble opinion - by hold music. Annabeth tries not to get too pissed off, especially as she realizes that said music is way too fucking loud for this situation - which is to say, it's regular volume.

“Hey, you got perfect timing, Pep and I were just about to call, in fact. We’re getting back way earlier than scheduled - first time for everything, I know - the jet is getting us back there in 15 minutes flat, really, and that’s not even at-”

“Mr. Stark,” Annabeth says, her volume at half of what it regularly is for a reason. There’s a beat - only one. And it seems that that's all it takes for that fast-paced, coffee-fuelled tone to be stripped completely from his voice.

“What's wrong?” She thinks she picks up on Pepper voicing a question in the background of the call.

“Morgan is not hurt,” is what she starts with. Annabeth explains, voice still at half volume, voice still even, that there are several armed people inside the building, and several more still to enter. She tells him about the cameras being off, too.

They don't address her immediately, but that isn't to say that there's an absence of noise.

“FRIDAY, pull up everyone's locations, give me ETAs for all of ‘em. And a map. Right now. And crank up the speed to max,” Annabeth hears Mr. Stark say, a background of beeps and clicks coming through the phone as well. There's half a beat. “Annabeth? Everything's gonna be alright, just hang tight until we get there. I’m notifying law enforcement in the area, just until…”

He only pauses for half a second before Annabeth uses the break in speech to cut in. “They were dressed in SWAT uniforms.” There's yet another half a beat before Annabeth hears Mr. Stark speaking under his breath vaguely. Then:

“Yeah, okay. Don't worry, it'll just take a couple more minutes then. You would not believe how many Avengers are in NYC at this very moment, not to mention in the day-to-day.” Annabeth recognizes the tone. And it’s comforting - not because that’s what it's designed to be, no, but because it's familiar - because it's the same tone she uses- Hades, it’s the same tone she was half using with Morgan a few seconds ago.

“In the meantime,” he continues, “you two are somewhere safe, right? Out of sight?”

“We are,” she confirms.

“Okay, good, cool. Just- nope, never mind, don’t tell me where you are, I don’t know how secure this line is. FRIDAY, check how secure this line is.” Annabeth hears him release a breath. She can’t really tell whether it’s a huff or a sigh or something else. “Is- Morgan’s okay, right? Like-”

“She is not hurt,” Annabeth repeats, her conviction coming through despite her quieter-than-normal voice. “At all.”

“Okay,” Mr. Stark says, and it’s like he’s letting out a breath of tension with that one single word. There’s a beat. Only one.

“I can put her on the phone.”

“Yes.” The answer is almost immediate, and there’s no need for anything further. Annabeth moves her hand slowly, making sure not to alarm Morgan as her hand gets closer to the younger girl’s shoulder. She taps it twice before she slowly slides the headphones off of one of her ears.

“Hey, Morgan, keep your eyes closed for me, okay?” She nods against Annabeth’s shoulder, where her head is resting. “I’ve got a phone call for you. Not too busy to take it?” She shakes her head. “Okay then.” And she moves the phone to one of Morgan’s hands, placing her own back on the younger girl’s back so she doesn’t get scared about loosening her hold around Annabeth’s neck.

Really, there’s no way that she’ll fall unless she starts dancing or something, but Annabeth is the first person that’ll tell you that logic has absolutely zero part to play in fear.

Morgan moves the phone to her ear and says, finally, “Hi. This is The Morgan speaking.”

Her voice is slightly louder than a whisper, the younger girl possessing the presence of mind to remember Annabeth’s earlier instructions. The response is muffled and too unclear for Annabeth to make out properly. And then, the first thing that Morgan says back to them is:

“I think Annie has a flip phone.” Because of course it is. Evidently, you don’t grow up the daughter of infamous tech moguls and not pick up their distaste for out-of-date electronics. The response is unmistakably a laugh.

She ponders on what example she’s setting, letting Morgan call her ‘Annie.’ A bad one, probably. ‘Annie’ is typically reserved for Estelle’s use and Estelle’s use only. (Whereas Sally calls her ‘Beth’ every once in a while, which makes her heart melt an immeasurable amount every time without fail.)

(Percy, on the other hand, has a few nicknames of his own that he uses, but none of them are a shortened version of her name, because he’s smarter than people (read: ignorant idiots) seem to think and knows that Annabeth would battle him to the death on the spot despite her love for him.)

It’s with a heavy heart that she concludes that she will not be having a talk with Morgan about the incorrect use of her name. And definitely not now.

Not now, when they’re both around a storey above any surface and another storey from actual ground.

The shallow cuts on her back finally make themselves known, burning faintly as Annabeth assumes the adrenaline begins to leave her system. Well, it was fun while it lasted. Her arm follows soon, the longer, finer cuts calling out for attention as well.

She’s thankful for the sweater she’s wearing - and even more so for the fact that she knows from experience that the knitted fabric she wears so scarcely is very absorbent. She can’t put into words how much she does not need her blood to be dripping down the side of this vent. There's not really any point to being out of sight when there’s a drip-drip-drip pointing straight towards your hiding spot.

She keeps her ears open for sounds outside of Morgan’s phone call, even as her mind commences its wandering once again. The subject of the minute seems to be the comparison of running shoes and climbing shoes. Which is best to wear on a regular day-to-day basis?

She's sidetracked briefly (when isn't she?) by being thankful for the extended periods of time that she spent on the rock climbing wall at CHB. Now that she thinks of it, she hasn't practiced on that thing in a while - and that, that is just unacceptable. Leo's added two updates to that thing that she hasn't tried yet. Like, seriously Annabeth, get your head in the game. Honestly.

She’s not sure if it's footsteps or clattering, but a sound of some kind grabs her attention, signalling that some not-SWAT members are close.

“Morgan?” she says quietly, and the younger girl stops mid-sentence. “Can you go back to listening to your playlist for a few minutes?” Morgan nods into her shoulder, giving a brief goodbye of sorts into the phone before she slips the phone back into Annabeth’s hand, slides her headphones back on, and re-clasps her hands together around Annabeth's neck.

“Annabeth?” A tinge of worry has slipped itself into Mr. Stark’s voice. “What's wrong, is everything okay?”

“Footsteps,” she answers simply.

“Okay, just keep calm and quiet,” Mr. Stark says, his voice slow and steady on the words. “You should be fine as long as you're out of sight.” Annabeth gives a very quiet hum to convey her understanding. The footsteps are getting louder now, unmistakable to Annabeth’s ears. Mr. Stark carries on the conversation on his lonesome.

“You know the ‘Auntie Nat’ that Morgan talks about non-stop twenty-four-seven? The Black Widow? Well, she’s barely sixty seconds out from where you are. One of the most badass people I've ever met in my life - honest. Kicked my ass more than a couple times - but don't go around telling people that, it doesn't do my reputation any favours.”

There's a noise that Annabeth can't identify on the line. Something like interference but not quite. One of the cuts on her arm burns as the fabric of her sweater shifts slightly.

“FRIDAY?” she hears, followed by, “The local signal is being compromised, Boss, the connection won’t last much longer.”

“Shit.” Yeah. Basically. “Okay, Annabeth, can you give me any hint about where you are without-”

“With the puzzles,” she says, voice quieter than even before. The footsteps are getting closer and closer to the room, and it won't be long until they're too close for Annabeth to risk speaking.

“Okay, I'm telling her. Just a bit longer,” he says. “Annabeth. Everything's gonna be j-”

They’ll probably assume it's the signal - and maybe it did cut out at the same time, who knows? But Annabeth holds the phone away from her ear and is greeted by a familiar hiss of air and a miniature cracking sound that signals that the flip phone has gone berserk.

It's part of a safety measure that Annabeth and Harley had collaborated on once their mortal phones had exploded one too many times as a result of the stupid relationship between demigods and technology. Better a hiss and a crack than a boom, y’know? Especially in this situation.

Annabeth slips the phone back into her pocket and returns her hand to rest on Morgan's back. Now all that's left to do is wait for the Black Widow.

And wait she does.

For half a minute.

That's how long it takes before she hears the first gunshot. The footsteps immediately turn in the opposite direction. Annabeth reflects on how advanced the noise cancelling technology of Morgan's headphones is with half a smile. That's just one more thing to be thankful for then.

It's safe to say that the next two or three minutes are not without sound. And it's also safe to say that the Black Widow is very efficient.

She hears another set of footsteps faintly, only noticing them when they're in the room. They're softer, not like they're carrying around a plethora of fake SWAT equipment, and they're more measured.

The voice that calls out is calm and measured too, soft on the edges and purposefully non-confrontational. “Annabeth? This is Natasha, Tony sent me.”

Annabeth’s view of her isn't exactly the best but she does notice the bright red hair, and that (along with her espionage walk and the fact that she's in the room with the puzzles, after all) is enough for Annabeth when her instincts aren't telling her otherwise.

She waits a beat just to be sure.

“Up here,” is all she answers with, moving to withdraw her legs from the metal bar before she starts moving down the vent. She reflects that it's a good thing that she's not claustrophobic. She sees Natasha move towards the vent opening below her. Annabeth slides the cover off with her foot and the older woman shifts out of her landing zone.

It takes maybe thirty second in total for Annabeth to return to the ground, moving slowly and calmly the whole way in order to avoid jolting Morgan. (And maybe it also has something to do with the fact that she doesn't want the questions that come with fluidly jumping down out of a vent opening.) She lowers herself from the vent instead of jumping, tall enough that all she has to do is get her feet back on the ground before she releases her hold on the vent.

Without a doubt, the woman that stands before her is the Black Widow, patently recognizable from the photographs that litter the Potts-Stark house from one room to the next. The expression she wears is smooth, not remotely the same as the goofy ones Annabeth remembers seeing.

The older woman's eyes catch first on the blood staining Annabeth’s sleeve, but they slide off just as quickly, moving to look at Annabeth’s face. She doesn't say anything right off the bat, but she does offer Annabeth a soft, comforting smile. Annabeth gives half of one in return.

“Guess introductions are already out of the way,” Natasha says eventually.

“Yeah,” is all Annabeth offers. She shifts her attention to Morgan, tapping her on the shoulder before she removes one of the headphones again. In the newfound calm, she can faintly hear the music from Morgan’s party playlist.

“Hey, Morgan, do you wanna open your eyes?” Morgan shakes her head, keeping it in the crook of Annabeth’s neck. “Okay. Guess who's here?”

“Hey munchkin.”

“Auntie Nat?” Morgan asks in a whisper.

“Yeah, her hair’s a lot brighter in person than you guys let on,” she says, partly to fill the silence and partly because she just can't get over how incredibly bright it actually is. Rachel’s hair is honestly tame compared to this. “And it's okay to stop whispering, by the way.”

“Okay,” she murmurs, and Annabeth allows a beat to pass because she can tell that Morgan has more to say. “Can…” She trails off and readjusts her hold on Annabeth.

“Do you want Auntie Nat to carry you?” Annabeth asks gently. Morgan nods quickly against her shoulder. “Alrighty.”

“C’mere munchkin,” Natasha says as they make the transfer, “It's been for-e-ver since you gave me a bone-crushing hug.” Morgan clasps her hands together again, this time around Natasha’s neck, and Annabeth notices only then that some of the blood from her sleeve has transferred to the fabric of Morgan’s jacket.

Thank goodness that this jacket holds the title of Morgan’s least favourite jacket of all time and that she’ll probably have no problem if it just disappears from sight forever. She makes good time in moving towards the closet, retrieving the discarded bags and finding another jacket.

“Hey Morgan, I'm gonna switch out your jacket for something a bit more comfy, is that cool?” She nods, snuggling closer to her aunt as the older woman smooths out her hair. They make quick work of switching out the jackets, Annabeth folding the discarded one up in such a complex way that if someone wanted to find the blood, they might be forced to take an academic course in advanced untangling strategies.

Neither of the women miss how Morgan shifts her head until her headphones fall back into place over her ears. Something inside Annabeth’s gut burns at the thought of- no, wait, actually, that’s just her arm again.

Anabeth’s attention wanders again, and with it, so do her fingertips, roaming around until they settle on her lower back. She prods it in a way, moving her fingertips over the space where she can feel a wetness soaking in slowly. When she retracts her hand, there’s no mistaking the blood staining her fingertips.

She returns her hand to the area, probing around to see if there are any pieces of glass still hanging on. Thankfully, there are only a few stuck to the fabric of her sweater, and none still in her skin - at least, none that she notices. And what more can she really ask for at the moment?

She does the same inspection for her arm, even though she doesn’t think that those cuts are deep enough to have kept glass within them - but, still, rarely in Annabeth’s life does something go according to one of her ‘oh please, this couldn’t happen’ thoughts.

She doesn’t miss Natasha’s gaze on her, prodding the cuts without acknowledging it, pleasantly surprised to find that they don’t contain any glass either - even if the process makes the burning sensation rear its head again. But she tries to ignore the whole injury situation - after all, medical care is a problem for future Annabeth to worry about.

(She usually criticizes her friends for these trains of thoughts, encouraging them to think about the consequences of their actions and the things that they need to get done. But Annabeth isn't perfect and she knows it. And sometimes you just need to put something off until you’re ready to deal with it.)

(Advice isn’t a one-size-fits-all kind of thing, all situations are different like all people are different. That’s what makes it so hard to give advice - what makes it hard to be the person people go to when they need some. But she gives pretty good advice in general, if she says so herself. And she’s not just about to turn people away when they come to her for help. Just like she won’t discourage people from coming to her in the first place.)

(Because, after all, people, especially demigods-)

The sirens are what she hears first, her attention snapping to the window, getting a good view of two vehicles pulling up outside. They’re not emergency services, Annabeth knows for sure - after all, she can tell what a city vehicle looks like and these aren’t it. No, these look like a cross between ambulances and paddy-wagons - they’re probably SI property- or Avengers property more likely. (She doesn’t know why she makes a distinction; not only are the two groups nearly synonymous, but Annabeth thinks that the latter is under the funding and relative direction of the former.)

At the same time, she notices the distinct lack of a black van outside, the not-SWAT team’s vehicle nowhere to be seen. She gathers a few seconds later that the new vehicles in fact aren’t ambulances, just reinforcements of some kind. The people that file out have uniforms that Annabeth thinks she vaguely recognizes - but she can tell that they’re not police officers for sure.

Natasha doesn’t make any move to go anywhere, despite the fact that she must see the vehicles pull up too. And Annabeth follows her lead.

The next couple of minutes mesh together, a few more cars arriving outside but nothing of importance until the sound of thrusters touching down on the pavement outside interrupts the activity. It’s not hard to see the few people outside part to make a path as Mr. Stark and Pepper step out of the Iron Man and Rescue suits, respectively. They rush inside with great speed, the empty suits closing again and turning to the street, their backs against the facility.

The majority of Annabeth’s sweater is a light pink colour, making the blood stain on her sleeve - and on her back too, most likely - very apparent. And she knows that the last thing two parents need to see when they’re worried about their kid is the bright red colour of blood.

Natasha only nods when Annabeth tells her she’s gonna use the bathroom; she feels the older woman’s eyes follow her out, only having to pass one room before she sees the one she wants, slipping in and trying not to get bloodstains on the handle as she closes the door behind herself.

It takes maybe ten seconds for her to hear heavy footsteps - running footsteps - pass on the other side of the door, and she stops herself from listening in on the faint conversation taking place two rooms down. She sets to work on trying to get rid of some of the excess blood, wanting to at least minimize the wet, sticky feeling that goes along with it.

It's not until she feels some leftover tension release itself from her shoulders that she realizes the situation is over now. If she had to guess, it's been less than half an hour since her wandering gaze caught on the black van outside.

This is the shortest dangerous situation she's been in in a while. That’s probably a good thing, right?

Don't get cocky now, she chides herself after a second, not when the winter solstice is less than a month away.

Chapter Text

The Avengers' communication channels aren’t perfect by any means - they never have been.

Tony’s been trying to work out the kinks for a while now - slowly at first, but compulsively by the time his doctors were finally persuaded to let him go home in the wake of his snap’s effects. By the time the first anniversary of the Blip rolls around, he’s convinced the majority of his circle of active superheroes (and a few inactive ones, too - if you can consider any of them inactive, that is) to carry around a comm or tracker of one kind or another.

He gets complaints about it every now and again, but he has no regrets - especially not as the holographic map pops up in front of him, narrowing to show only New York City. The pins indicating locations pop up and if he could think of anything other than his daughter, he might think that it’s finally paying off in a big way.

Except he can’t. His thoughts are screaming about Morgan on repeat, even as he gives orders to Friday and Pepper’s fingers fly from one tablet to another, his wife already on her feet on instinct, gravitating towards him as the seconds pass.

They should both be sitting down, really, the jet’s speed cranking up to max as fast as it can without causing them serious bodily harm.

He’s trying to get into the camera feeds - something that should be easy since it’s his goddamn facility in the first place (his facility, that’s being broken into by men with guns while his daughter’s inside) - when Annabeth’s voice says: “They were dressed in SWAT uniforms,” and he barely bites down on the choice words that come to mind, his words coming through on an autopilot carefully calibrated from years of being a superhero.

“You two are somewhere safe, right?” he asks. Morgan’s okay, right? “Out of sight?” They can’t see her, right?

And he barely stops himself from making Annabeth give away their location - it occurs to him way too slowly that these assholes being on site means that they could have corrupted the connection - that his babysitter’s phone isn’t high grade at all.

He tries to stop himself from getting distracted with Friday - with the pieces of information popping up one after the other.

“Morgan’s okay, right?” Pepper has stopped moving beside him, both of them running out of things to do, forced to sit and wait while the jet tries to get them back to their daughter. Tony reaches over and squeezes her hand. Their fingers intertwine unconsciously.

“She is not hurt. At all.” (It’s the conviction in her voice that makes the hand crushing his heart loosen its hold a fraction.) Pepper’s other arm curls itself around their joined hands.

Their voices join together too, when Annabeth says she can put Morgan on the phone, jumping at the opportunity like it’s the cure to cancer. (But it isn’t, it’s a phone call with their daughter in the middle of this fucking situation - and god help any soul who tries to convince them that the former is better than the latter.)

Morgan’s voice is quiet, a whisper like Annabeth’s - and knowing that the whisper is keeping their position hidden doesn’t do anything to stop him from hating the fact that she sounds so small. She is small, she shouldn’t sound small.

“Hey sweetheart,” Pepper says, Tony in awe at the lack of a crack or waver in her voice. Hearing Morgan’s voice for the few minutes that their conversation lasts, even as both of their eyes remain glued to Friday's display, keeps the vise-like grip on his heart from crushing him.

(He can’t even register the breath he lets out when Nat’s message comes through, giving him her ETA as her position on the map starts getting closer and closer to the highlighted facility. A message from Rhodey also comes through, telling him that he’s already in the suit and on his way over.)

(Tony envies him slightly, envies the fact that he can get in his suit right now. His brain knows that the jet getting them to the ground and the suits taking them the rest of the way is the fastest solution, but it doesn’t stop the fact that he feels kind of powerless without his suit - without seeing the air rushing by all around him.)

(Rhodey may be flying but he’s much farther away than Nat, who’s only two minutes out. By the estimates Friday has flashing in front of him, Tony and Pepper will probably get there before him too.)

Morgan’s voice stops mid sentence and his heart skips a beat or three before he hears Annabeth’s quiet voice instructing her faintly. He has Friday turn the sound of the call up again.

“Annabeth? What’s wrong, is everything okay?”

(Some part of his brain should probably step up and tell him that Annabeth is just a babysitter. That her voice gets quieter and quieter with every answer after that and that the footsteps she hears must be getting louder and louder.)

He fills the silence with updates on Nat’s location, his eyes glued to Friday's projections but his attention anywhere but. Sixty seconds, he thinks, just sixty more seconds.

(Some part of his brain should probably smack itself twice and get its goddamn head in the game so it can tell him that Annabeth is a civilian in the middle of this too. That Morgan might not hear the footsteps with her headphones on, but Annabeth certainly can. That their babysitter may be smart and dependable and capable of bending children to her will, but she’s not even old enough to drink yet, for fuck’s sake.)

Interference comes over the line and he defers to Friday, who tells him that these assholes are messing with the signal. And then his attention glides to the progress bar a few inches to the left, which still hasn’t told him whether or not their connection is being monitored.

And Annabeth says puzzles, and he doesn’t know what he would’ve done had it not clicked instantly. But it does. That absolutely shit picture he decided to take himself instead of getting Friday to do it as an excuse to use Peter’s new clunky camera.

He starts sending Natasha directions to the room (third floor, if he remembers properly, the one at the end of a hall, with the big tables and enough floor space for Morgan to do a backflip or whatever Annabeth decides to teach her next) and barely gets through his next sentence before he hears a click - before the orange box pops up in front of the caller information in front of him - signal compromised.

It’s four more minutes before the jet touches down. Another three before their suits get them to the facility. Forty seconds till they have to stop themselves from colliding into Nat. A blink for Pepper to snatch Morgan up, another for Tony’s arms to wrap around both of them.

Morgan giggles, and the sound is all it takes for the tension of the last god knows how long to fall away from his shoulders.

According to Morgan’s clock, it’s some time past eleven when Friday wakes him up. She’s quiet about it, and sounds a little apprehensive too - as much as she can be, really - so he assumes that it’s a requirement of one of his many protocols.

Evidently, he’d fallen asleep on the ground, leaning against Morgan’s bed. Pepper’s in a similar position beside him, sitting on top of a pillow like the one he’d forgone. He drapes a blanket over her shoulders, knowing that she’d murder him if he even suggested the idea of her sleeping somewhere else tonight.

“Nebula has notified the landing station of her arrival,” Friday says.

Nebula arrives on-planet a few minutes later, and it’s not even midnight yet when she steps into the doorway of Morgan’s room with first degree murder in her eyes.

“Hey,” he greets quietly, her face turning towards him and not softening in the slightest. He pats the ground beside him and she considers it for a second before she obliges, coming over and sliding down into a criss-cross-apple-sauce situation. He tilts his head towards her and lets it lean back against the wall behind him.

“I have not been briefed on the situation,” she growls and whispers at the same time. He smiles lightly at her.

“Hey, Neb, how’ve you been? How’s space? Nice? Good, good- me? I’m peachy, thanks for asking.” Her eyes continue to project murder, not settling back into their regular grievous bodily harm mode. “I get it, okay?” he says. “Let’s put it off until tomorrow. Don’t tell me you hate our guest rooms that much.”

“Your guest rooms are adequately comfortable,” she finally grinds out, “but I will stay here for the night and keep watch.”

“Neb-” She puts her hand out in front of his face.

“You humans are notoriously dependent on sleep,” she says, and Tony can’t just not take it as an insult. She grabs a pillow and shoves it against his chest. “You will sleep.” He takes the order as what it is, and makes himself horizontal with a medium amount of grumbling. “And so shall you.” Tony turns his head to see Pepper - ever the light sleeper - looking almost fondly at the two of them, still leaning against Morgan’s bed.

She smiles softly at Nebula, sleep still coating her face. “Hi.”

“Horizontally,” Nebula insists.

“Yes, ma’am,” Pepper says, “Us fickle humans will need a hug in payment though.” Her arms open up like a flower, waiting semi-patiently until Nebula finally makes her way over and obliges.

“Your partner is a very skilled negotiator, Tony.”

He finds himself awake at just after six thirty the next morning, dimly surprised at the time. Apparently that’s what happens when an adult follows a five-year-old’s bedtime schedule. Nebula’s still awake and sitting where she’d positioned herself last night, twirling a dagger in each hand.

He doesn’t even have the force of will to be suspicious about it anymore. He’d realized a while ago that her fidgeting with weapons is like his fidgeting with machine parts. Either because of boredom or disinterest, most of the time.

“Get yourself a cup of coffee before you attempt to speak,” she says when he opens his mouth, not even looking over. She’s a gem, really.

“Yeah, I’m just getting in now, we’re due to meet in the - well, what used to be the common floor - in about an hour.”

“Okay, just FYI, I think I’ve still got some chocolate stashed around the place - not sure what kind though, probably more than one.”

“Seriously, Tony? You know how long it’s probably been since the expiration date on those things passed?”

“‘Course I do. Know why? Because chocolate doesn’t expire, Steve-cicle. And that’s a fact.”

“I- You know what? Sure, Tony. Get food poisoning or whatever on your own time.”

“Friday, save this for me, I feel so vindicated right now.”

“Back to the topic at hand? We’ll go over everything here first before we split up - Natasha and co. are gonna come over to your place to make sure we’re all on the same page, while we-”

“I’m hearing a lot of ‘we’s right now, Steve- not to mention the fact that you’re in the city instead of somewhere in the middle of nowhere like you’ve been for the last four months.”

“I don’t… I’m not sure what you’re saying Tony. Regardless, Buck and I’ll probably end up following up on any half-promising leads we’ve found after-”

“No, y-”

“No?”

“Yeah: no. You’re out of the game, okay? I know how hard that was for you, I’m not gonna a-”

“There’s no asking involved, Tony. Some idiots decided they wanted to mess with- there’s no asking involved. I don’t care if you can handle this without me or not. I’ve got two hands that are ready and willing and I’m not taking no for an answer.”

“Hmm. You practice that often or…”

“And I’m not out of the game - I’m retired. There’s a difference.”

“Which is? Never mind, it doesn’t matter. Thanks. I mean it, really.”

“I know you do, Tony. But you should know that it’s not necessary. There’s no asking involved.”

“That your new catchphrase or something?”

“Or something.”

“You know in, like, middle school,” is what Harley opens with, only a second after he’s entered through the front door, no preamble (and no warning from Friday about his arrival either, which makes Tony and Nat stop in the middle of their conversation and Pepper look up from her tablet), “when hot gossip is going around, there’s a trail that it follows - first the people within earshot, then their friends, etc. And some of these paths just don’t keep going because, whatever, but eventually it reaches 92 percent of the student population. And then, like, three months later, everyone’s reminiscing about the gossip and some kid is just like, ‘what?!’”

He plops himself down on one of the armchairs opposite the couches the three of them are on. “You know how fucking annoying that is? Being literally the last person to know?”

What?

“I- Aren’t you supposed to be in Boston?” And the look on his face reads clearly, this is what you’re choosing to say right now Tony?

“Let me rephrase: do you know how absolutely fucking annoying that is?” There’s a beat.

“Hey,” Nat greets near-pleasantly, like, long time no see, Harley, how you been? There’s half a second that passes before she reaches into her inside jacket pocket and pulls out a snickers bar, holding it out for him. He scowls in anticipation. “You’re not you when you’re-”

“No!” he says. “You’re all complicit, you’re not allowed to make jokes.” He frowns, turning away, reaching into his tool belt, pulling out his own snickers bar and opening it, muttering something under his breath about breakfast- and then something similar about lunch. Tony should start carrying snickers bars around too.

Harley inhales his in three seconds flat, eyeing all of them suspiciously before, during, and afterwards.

“Are we doing okay today?” Tony asks apprehensively, concerned. 

“I’m doing absolutely fantastic; you, however, are this far away from getting an entire lab makeover, so help me-”

“I’m sorry, I just can’t seem to get over the fact that you’re in the wrong state, Harley. How long-”

“If you must know,” he says, and, yes, Tony must know, “I’ve been in New York since last night - I visit every couple weeks under threat of grievous bodily harm. Now. Can we get back to the matter of why didn’t any of you tell me?”

And that’s when it finally clicks into place.

“Because you know what’s worse than not finding out the day of? Finding out the day after from someone who pretty much assumed that I already knew!”

“I’m sorry, Harley,” Tony says, motioning for him to come over. He obliges, rising from his armchair and plopping down beside him on the couch. Tony swings an arm around his shoulders. “I think it slipped my mind in the middle of everything.”

Harley crosses his arms, sliding downwards and letting out a half-hearted breath.

“I’m sorry we made you worry.”

Harley shakes his head minutely. “I wasn’t worried. Annabeth said Morgan was fine and Annabeth doesn’t lie to me, so. I was just pissed off,” he says. “And she could tell, anyway, so she kicked me out and told me to get my ass over here for a couple hours.” 

Tony pulls him closer, ignoring his continuous sinking into the abyss that is the couch. “She kicked you out?” He hums the positive. “Good.-” he ignores Harley’s half-assed nearly-indignant sound of protest “-We’ve missed you around here.”

Harley stays for dinner but can’t be persuaded to spend the night, citing the likely penalty of murder, which Tony makes a note to ask about later.

(He leaves with a new Stark phone in hand and a warning to Tony about not getting his hopes up about Annabeth accepting it. Finding out that their babysitter’s phone (oh god, a flip phone, of all things) had overheated had been just the excuse Tony needed to get her one that he knows has a secure connection.)

His ride is, of all things, a beat-up white van with a giant all-too-neon strawberry on the side. Harley takes one look at Tony taking one look at it and says:

“Don’t even get me started, man. I’ve been trying to get them to burn this in a ditch for years.”

There’s a muffled sound from the driver’s seat that Tony can’t make out.

“Camp tradition, my ass,” Harley calls back.

It’s only after he’s in the van and the van is down the street that Tony’s old-man brain manages to connect a dot or three. “Wait,” he says to no one in particular, turning vaguely in Pepper’s direction, “since when does Harley go to a camp?”

Chapter Text

[09:18]

TS: Hey

TS: Called earlier (a horrible mistake according to Harley - apparently texting is the sole valid form of communication)

TS: Get back to me when you can

Annabeth and Percy’s bodies sway dutifully as the Grey Sisters’ Taxi swerves, somehow changing direction by more than a hundred and ten degrees. It’s the fastest ride in the state - and in the dozen they’ll pass through before they make it to their destination state, where this taxi is still the fastest ride available to them that won’t put her boyfriend in danger of death by chief asshole of the sky.

At a certain point, the guarantee of still having all of your extremities intact is one that you have to juggle with if you have a deadline that will pass in less than two days, to be met in a state that is normally a car ride just shy of forty eight hours away.

Annabeth navigates to the phone’s notifications and, sure enough, one of them reads (after a moment or two of decoding): [10 hours ago | 2 Missed Calls - Tony Stark]

[09:23]

TS: Also, how’s the phone

I mainly hate it, she wants to text back. The only reason I accepted it is because Harley spent an entire half an hour convincing me to (“I’ll show you how to take the battery out,” he’d pleaded. “Oh, please,” she’d said, “you can’t take out any phone’s batteries nowadays.” “By the time I’m done with it, it’ll be more of a Keener Phone than a Stark Phone,” he’d promised.) - half an hour which could have been used for some much needed sleep or, preferably, teaching Jonathan how not to get a claw straight to their sword hand whenever they go on the offensive.

She either takes a breath or lets one out - she’s too sick and tired of quests and too tired in general to care which it is. She spends a minute wondering how she should go about saying that she pretty much hates it before deciding that it’s all futile. She skips the question entirely.

[09:24]

AC: Just saw the notifications

AC: I make a habit of turning my phone off a lot

AC: Something you wanted to tell me?

TS: Basically

TS: More of an in-person thing though

AC: I’m not in town right now

TS: I know

TS: Harley is a level eight gossip

AC: 12*

TS: Later though

AC: Okay

TS: [thumbs-up emoji]

Percy hooks his arm through hers and leans his head onto her shoulder as Annabeth slips her phone back into one of her many pockets. She had to switch her designated mortal phone pocket because the Stark Phone is so much bigger than her old flip phone.

“Do you think I would be at a greater or lesser risk of death if I took my seat belt off?” he asks, after they both lurch forward, the seat belts digging into their necks. She stretches hers out.

“Greater,” she decides after a second, “but only slightly.”

“So what you’re saying is,” he starts, blinking cutely as he tilts his head slightly in one direction. She stops him right there, confiscating the hand that’s reaching for the seat belt release button and intertwining their fingers together.

“What I’m saying, is that I would murder you horribly if you died because of lack of seatbelt,” she finishes, both of them nodding in sage understanding. A flurry of notifications sound from her pocket, reminding her that she forgot to turn the phone off. The notifications continue even as she pulls the phone out and opens it, clicking to the source.

[09:29]

TS: [smiling face with sunglasses emoji]

TS: [smiling face with sunglasses emoji] [smiling face with sunglasses emoji] [smiling face with sunglasses emoji] [neutral face emoji] [face with tears of joy emoji]

TS: [see-no-evil monkey emoji]

TS: [hear-no-evil monkey emoji]

TS: [speak-no-evil monkey emoji]

TS: [beaming face with smiling eyes emoji]

TS: [nail polish emoji] [nail polish emoji] [smiling face with sunglasses emoji] [nail polish emoji]

She blinks once.

[09:29]

TS: [merman emoji]

TS: [high-heeled shoe emoji]

TS: [high-heeled shoe emoji]

TS: [high-heeled shoe emoji]

TS: [high-heeled shoe emoji]

“Oh look,” Percy says, eyes on her phone screen. “It’s Triton and the entire stock of Chiron’s shoe closet!” There are a few beats of calm as Annabeth continues to look semi-expectantly at the phone screen.

[09:30]

TS: News to absolutely no one: Harley’s also a level twelve pain in my ass

TS: [peace sign emoji]

TS: ^That one was actually me

Leaving him on read seems the most appropriate choice.

The Sisters let them out in front of a cafe just down the street from U of C, Berkeley, where Annabeth hands over a considerable number of drachmas. She weighs the cost mentally against how much they would have had to pay otherwise (not taking into account the possibility of death because that’s generally a given in any situation) and decides that she can live with it.

The taxi peels away due north as soon as the sister in the passenger’s side seat - Tempest, Annabeth thinks, though she’s not incredibly confident in her ability to tell the three of them apart - has clasped her hand around the pouch of drachmas.

A dull red pick up truck pulls up in its place. The driver leans forward slightly in her seat to get a better view of the two of them, her dark braid slipping off her shoulder as she alternates her gaze between Annabeth and Percy twice. Then:

“Someone needs a nap,” she comments dryly.

“I sleep better in the backseat,” Percy says immediately, snatching Annabeth’s bag from her and climbing in, collapsing against the seats and managing to close the door behind himself with only his foot. Annabeth takes her seat in the front; the half of Percy’s face that isn’t smushed against the fabric of the seat and the coats he’s fallen on smiles at her as she clicks her seat belt into place.

“Seat belt, Percy,” Reyna reminds him after a second, tilting her head to look at him via the rearview mirror.

“Aye aye, Cap’n.”

The drive to Mount Tamalpais takes about an hour and a half, but they’re not heading there just yet. Instead, they stop a good few minutes away, far enough that they can assume their chances of being spotted are about the same as always.

Maybe better, actually, because Reyna had two car air freshener vent clips installed in the car when they got in and added a third once they’d made it within an hour of the mountain. She also emptied an entire canister of Febreeze in the car, some of it pointed very clearly in Percy’s direction.

Suffice it to say, Annabeth can’t smell the faint hint of the ocean from her boyfriend anymore - though she’s not sure if that means much when compared to monsters and their demigod sniffing skills.

“You can take a nap too,” Reyna says, her gaze passing briefly over Annabeth as it continues taking in the sight of Mount Tam in the distance. Percy has been completely out for nearly an hour now, his head lolled back and arms wrapped around the balled up coats in his lap.

She’s crossed over three or four time zones today but it was before six this morning when they left the city. And, at present, it’s been dark for more than a couple hours in California time. But her sleep schedule has had worse. Way, way worse.

“I’ll save mine for later.”

Annabeth and Reyna share an apple pie that balances precariously on the arm rest between them. Every fork contact could be their last. Annabeth glaces at her, taking in her appearance - which is kind of weird, because she just saw her two days ago at Camp Jupiter for Hazel’s party.

(She remembers thinking that it’s nice to be able to celebrate Hazel’s birthday this year. The 17th is usually so close to the solstice that something inevitably gets in the way of all of them being able to gather and throw a little confetti here and there. She’d actually thought that this year wouldn’t have a solstice disaster.)

(It does. Just one with only two days warning.)

Her thoughts are fleeting and she doesn’t want to take out anything to work on lest she get more distracted than usual. The fact that her thoughts wander every couple minutes should go without saying - she likes it like that actually, most of the time.

It’s Friday night. Annabeth’s hanging out with a friend in her car, eating an apple pie late at night with her boyfriend asleep in the back seat. Sounds devastatingly normal. Any stranger she told about this would probably have no problem filling in the blanks in all the wrong ways.

(They went clubbing. They’re all a little buzzed, which explains the late night pie and the passed out bf in the backseat. They’re talking philosophically about baby names or something. They’re all underage? What harm do fake IDs do when they’re only fudged by a couple months, right? They’re twenty - livin’ it up in their golden college years.)

(Staking out a former war base two days before a winter solstice deadline? Ha, lol, nice one.)

Reyna notices her gaze.

She throws up a hesitant peace sign, a question mark written on her face. Annabeth throws up an identical gesture in solidarity. They nod loosely and go back to their wandering gazes and assessment of the barely-lit area, snacking on the rapidly disappearing pie.

“I’m in my twenties,” Reyna confesses in the midst of the silence.

Annabeth’s eyes flick over to the woman on her right, whose own gaze is still on the scene way ahead of them.

“I’m in my twenties. And I’m technically five years younger than I’m supposed to be,” Reyna says, letting out half a scoff that’s quickly muffled. “Twenties.”

“Twenties,” she agrees.

“I thought I’d be dead at sixteen,” Annabeth confesses after a few beats of mutual silence. “Seventeen and three quarters if they felt poetic.” Her voice is oddly normal, as if she hasn’t just told Reyna something she’s been struggling with admitting for years. As if the thought isn’t one that she’d pushed aside and overcame with spite and spite alone.

At some point, they’d actually started to look at each other like people in a normal conversation would, instead of just staring off into the scenery in a poor excuse of scouting the location out.

“I’d made plans to retire as Praetor when I hit twenty. But they were only hypotheticals,” Reyna says. “New Rome was right there, and I know that we had more examples of how a demigod’s life could turn out than you did, but it just- it was all a hypothetical.” She presses her thumb to the first knuckle of her middle finger, adjusting pressure slowly, fluctuating like she wants to crack her knuckle but can’t commit.

“A lot of demigods retire to New Rome, a lot of them have kids, a lot of them live out regular lives until old age. A lot of them,” she says, like she’s reciting a manual or a rule book, one that outlines demographics and their optimistic future. “A lot of demigods is a great thing. ‘A lot of demigods’...”

Reyna tucks half a strand of hair behind her ear, and Annabeth resists the urge to try and fill in the rest of her sentence for her - resists the urge to finish it when she has no place to do so. She might not know exactly what Reyna’s trying to say but she’s damn sure she knows how hard it must be for her to say it.

“‘A lot of demigods’ wasn’t Reyna, daughter of Bellona, Praetor,” Reyna says finally. “That was the forecast for ‘a lot of demigods.’” Her thumb returns to its fluctuations. Another beat passes, and this one feels like a parallel reality of comfortable - mostly the same, but just not quite right.

“I’d made plans to retire at twenty, but I thought I’d live till eighteen,” Reyna says. “And then everything just went crazy in my mind somehow - I’d thought I would stick it out until I died but… Seventeen. Things were set in place. Frank- Frank was - is - a natural born Praetor - there’s a reason he’s the first Praetor to be an in-field promotion in decades. And Hazel had her head set on her shoulders; unshakable - I knew earlier than that that she would be my replacement.” 

“I put it in my will, actually,” she confesses as something of a side note. “I stepped down with some kind of purpose that I can’t put a name to. I almost had it figured out - before.”

Before. There have been so many ‘before’s in Annabeth’s life. The first real one was ‘before Thalia died.’ It was definitely not the last. (‘Before the Lightning Bolt was stolen.’) (‘Before Tartarus.’) (‘Before Percy went missing.’)

But she knows which ‘before’ Reyna means. It’s unmistakable. It’s the only ‘before’ she shares with everyone else. Before.

Annabeth relates with Reyna’s point of view completely - not just about everything she said before, either. They both got out of the life in a big way right before. And then five years and change happened and chaos came along with it. And they weren’t so out anymore. It didn’t matter that everyone had stepped up when half of them disappeared. It just didn’t. They weren’t out anymore.

“And-” One blink seems to knock a new look onto Reyna’s face. “I didn’t mean to bombard you with that,” she says.

Annabeth shifts her jaw slightly, unsure how to say what she wants to say without it coming out wrong. Finally, she goes with a firm shake of her head. “I’m twenty,” she says - nearly shrugs with the metaphorical weight of the statement. “And I’ve already been dead for five years.” Annabeth hopes that the look on Reyna’s face means she did it right. “And Hazel just turned 23.”

Annabeth gives Reyna a face. A beat, before she repeats - and it does need repeating: “Twenty three.”

Morning comes slowly but surely, and Percy wakes up just in time to tell the two of them that a nap is mandatory. He gets side eyes but holds his ground, telling them to fork over both of the orange juice cartons that they have in their food supply and hit the hay.

They drive past the nearest town and back to Berkley at around noon, restocking some supplies and drawing up some rough plans for how they’re gonna play this. Annabeth hasn’t been at Mount Tam at all since the first and last time she’d been kidnapped to the location.

“I’ve been twice for some advanced recon, near the end of the Titan war,” Reyna says. “And then back again once for the actual final battle. Other than that, I haven’t been back since - but we had some scouts keep an eye on the area.”

They pack it up to go back with just enough daylight left to get them there. The sun sets fast in winter California.

After twenty minutes on the road, it starts raining. Hard.

Annabeth knows this much about rain in and around here from her limited experience - it rarely rains, but when it does… it really does.

Percy insists that Reyna let him drive now - as he has been for a few hours now. This time, though, he really insists - and Reyna agrees without much argument - missing him mutter that Californians don’t know how to drive in the rain in any way, shape, or form.

Reyna also connects the most urgent dots before they do.

If it’s raining here. Then.

“It’s snowing on Mount Tam.”

[23:09]

Unknown Number: Hey

Unknown Number: Sorry I’m texting you here my N-phone is going through some stuff

Unknown Number: It’s Harley btw

Unknown Number: Wait a sec I can fix that

HK: La voila

HK: Anyway

HK: Just have a quick question about smth the potato man said

HK: Umm. nm whoops

HK: Just realized where u are

HK: U don’t have to text back it’s not supes important I’ll ask later

HK: Man I hope you have ur text alerts off

Of fucking course she does. She remembers what happened at the last stake out.

On the morning of the solstice, a fresh layer of snowfall coats Mount Tam - and it’s still there hours after it gets dark.

They’d waited for the enemy forces to make the first move - or to show their presence at all, really. Rachel’s prediction had been vague at best and she had been the first to admit it, too. They’d gotten a couple of clue words about the location that took their sweet time deciding to make sense.

Only hours to go until midnight, they’d finally spotted some sign of the reason they’re here. The winds were picking up - but only in a halo surrounding Mount Tam. They can only confirm their suspicions once they’ve made it close enough to pick up on their shapes.

Venti, Reyna mouths.

They’re a good distance below where Atlas and the remains of the palace are, and so are the Venti, seemingly not paying any attention to the fact that Mount Tam - or, rather, Mount Othrys - used to be the Titans’ base in the war. Annabeth still hasn’t been able to determine what the Venti are doing here at all.

As it stands, they’re just gathering and building up a storm in a menacing way.

It turns out that they’re planning an attack on Camp Jupiter with a force comprised of only Venti, meant to occur in the very near future. Because of course they are.

Not all of the Venti stick around for the fight. Some of them split, and most of the ones that were slowly approaching the area did a 180 as far as Annabeth can see.

The three of them head straight for the thick of it for the most part, calling things out to each other here and there but essentially just going with the flow of the fight. Venti are one of Annabeth’s least favourite monster species to fight - they flow in and out of tangibility like it’s a see-saw and it takes a bit of work for Annabeth not to be pissed of by that fact.

She has to time her hits more because of it.

Her blade fazes right through one of them but cuts the one that was hovering just behind it. That’s one thing she uses to her advantage - what makes fighting a lot of Venti at once easier - almost preferable - to a one-on-one.

She slips, nearly. She thinks it’s some particularly slushy snow at first before she realizes that what she’s just run through is coated with a red tinge. Her head whips from one direction to the next as her blade completes its arc, her gaze landing once she’s returned to a ready stance.

Reyna’s hand is clasped around her upper arm - her dominant hand’s upper arm. Her cloak drapes weirdly, having been pushed behind her shoulders, leaving most of her frame uncovered.

There’s more blood than Annabeth had originally thought, and she can tell why - the cut goes across the length of her upper arm, still bleeding as Reyna’s free hand goes to the pouches on her belt. Annabeth thinks she knows what the other woman might be looking for.

She gets another of the Venti good enough to disintegrate them by the time she gets over to Reyna, pulling out a thick and extra durable roll of duct tape. Reyna realises what she’s planning, holding out her arm for her to continue. It takes half a minute for the temporary solution for Reyna’s bleeding problem to be put in place, at which point the other woman pointedly adjusts her cloak until it’s actually covering her properly.

They both move back into the thick of it.

It starts to go wrong when Annabeth falls on her face. Technically, she falls onto a rock on her face - and she’s actually pushed.

She gets back on her feet in time to: A) register that that’s definitely gonna bruise, and B) to get caught in a headlock from behind.

That’s also a bit of a mis-characterization though - headlocks are different from this. That’s right. There’s headlocks, and then there’s being choked from behind. The storm spirit’s fingers around her throat feel almost refreshingly solid, even if they are digging in uncomfortably.

Fortunately, she still has her knife, and she stabs - and she hates to do this - blindly behind her, aiming for where the storm spirit’s torso should be. Except it’s not there - not tangibly. Her hand passes through the not-there-torso, the cold, weird sensation washing over it as she retracts it again.

The storm spirit’s grip is tightening and becoming ever more uncomfortable. She thinks catching her breath would be a good thing for a second. Ironic.

And then she thinks a thought worth thinking. The hands must be tangible to be able to choke her.

Excellent idea. Pieces of advice like ‘bring your knife closer to your own throat’ are what make her renowned in the demigod advice giving community. Annabeth Chase - she’s not dead yet and if you knew her better, you’d seriously wonder how that’s the case.

Her vision blurs and she decides that there’s no room for hesitancy when she’s so close to blacking out. Go for the hands. Then hope that the move pisses the storm spirit off enough that the rest of their body becomes tangible again.

She slices without preamble, moving fluidly from one side of her covered neck to the other, trying to essentially guesstimate how close she should get. It goes over pretty well. Not even a scratch on that trusty neck of hers.

She doesn’t wait at all as she stabs backwards, hoping that the storm spirit’s recoil means that she’s thrown them off their rhythm. The disintegration that she catches sight of before she stumbles marks that assumption as a positive.

Unconsciously, her free hand goes to her throat, the other steadying her against the ground as she hacks and coughs.

She gets a rejuvenative juice from the medical staff at Camp Jupiter very early the next day - just before one in the morning if she has to put a name to the time - while Reyna gets her arm treated. She’s told it’s only for her vocal cords and not the external bruising, which at least means that her voice will be back to normal by, at most, the end of the day, which is a relief.

Everything she’d suspected would bruise, will, in fact, bruise. So, predictability! At least there’s that.

They're back in the city by sunrise.

[14:21]

[Incoming call | Pepper Potts]

“Hi Mrs. Potts.”

“Hi, Annabeth.”

“-just the latter part of a cold.”

“Really? I hope it didn’t get in the way of you enjoying your trip.”

“No, no, it’s only a little cold, nothing big.”

“Good, California’s nice this time of year.”

“-we call it a Christmas Eve’s Eve party. The 23rd is great because no one has plans. It’s an annual thing at this point.”

“Not in a million years, Annabeth, Morgan is dying to see you and everyone else is dying to meet you.”

“-any time in the day is great but between five and seven is best. And you have to stay for dinner.”

“Mrs. Potts-”

“And thanks for the reminder - you have to start calling me Pepper again.”

“-and you don’t have to bring anything, we have lots of stuff already - doesn’t mean you can’t though, if you want.”

“I-”

“Non-negotiable! Congratulations! I’m passing the phone to Harley now by his insistence, and I’ll remind you that dinner will be delicious in additional to being mandatory.”

“...”

“So, I take it you forgot you agreed to this?”

“My brain is delicate right now, Harley. I’m in the late stages of ‘ugh.’”

“I’m familiar - and I’m pretty thankful for it - Pepper wouldn’t have been able to convince you otherwise- Well, I guess she could’ve, but through persuasion instead of ‘no room for negotiation’ - which would've taken a lot longer.”

“I lack the energy to have this conversation, Harley, I need three more naps to be able to pass as ‘not recently been a punching bag’ by tomorrow.”

“So then you’ll text me?”

[Call Ended | Just now]

Chapter Text

An early winter breeze sneaks in through the door as Pepper opens it, revealing one of the last arrivals of the night - and the only one whose attendance had been dubbed mandatory by the lady of the household. Standing by the kitchen counter, both Natasha and Rhodey’s gazes move to the door, watching as Pepper steps to the side and ushers the younger woman in.

Annabeth Birgit Natalie Chase steps inside, a large and opaque rectangular container in her hands, dressed in a near-stereotypical holiday turtleneck and black jeans. 

“No coat?” Natasha hears Pepper ask.

“No, it’s not that cold yet.”

Harley stumbles past them, grabbing Rhodey’s plate - upon which a freshly-sliced-into-triangles sandwich he just finished assembling sits - as he passes. Rhodey gives him a ‘you little shit’ face and he just smirks back, having positioned himself on Pepper’s other side already.

“Annabeth!” he says, just before taking an extra large bite from the sandwich, winking at Rhodey in an aside. He says something unintelligible, to which Annabeth doesn’t answer, forcing him to try again after he’s swallowed the bite.

“How’s life?” Harley asks, at approximately the same time that Pepper shifts her gaze back to Annabeth and asks, “What happened?”

A musty bruise about the size and length of a finger sits just to the side of one of Annabeth’s cheekbones, contouring her otherwise makeup-free face. “I fell,” she says. “The rocks on Mt. Tamalpais are not forgiving.”

“Going hiking while it’s snowing isn’t really the best idea,” Pepper says, and Annabeth makes an agreeable ‘hmm, I should consider that’ face. “How was California otherwise? Your family doing good?” Something in Annabeth’s eyes changes marginally at that - a slight surprise at the question. Before she can answer though, Harley starts making grabby hands at the container she’s holding.

“What is it? Did you bring snacks? Cupcakes? An actual cake?” Rhodey takes the opportunity presented by Harley’s outstretched arms to snatch the plate back, shaking his head in a way that should be accompanied by tsk-tsk noises.

“We have two cakes already,” Pepper says.

“Nah- We had two cakes, we have half a cake,” Harley says, jabbing his thumb at a table in the dining room, just past the kitchen. True to his word, a half-eaten cake sits by its lonesome, surrounded by other quarter- to three-quarters-filled containers of party goods.

Annabeth makes a partial show of assessing Harley, whose eyes still remain on her, his hands intertwined together and sitting over his heart in a pleading gesture. “You can have one,” she says finally, peeling off one section of the lid just far enough that it creates an opening the size of Harley’s hand.

Harley, in turn, makes a very real show of covering his eyes with one hand while reaching the other one in through the opening, wiggling and stretching out his fingers before he does. The hand returns grasping… a single vividly-blue chocolate chip cookie.

The lid closes abruptly again, and Harley hesitantly removes his hand from in front of his eyes.

“Fuck yeah!” He pumps his fist - the one that isn’t holding the cookie like it’s a priceless treasure in an impermanent world. “Finally!” He addresses the cookie by bringing it up to eye-level with both hands: “I have not seen your beautiful essence for nearly twelve entire months! God!”

His declarations attract Tony’s attention, who glides over with a look on his face that captures the entire situation. Harley takes a bite, and then another, and then pops the entire thing inside his mouth, slapping his hands against his cheeks like he’s experiencing the best moment of his entire life. Tony joins the rest of them in assessing his mental health.

Annabeth explains when Harley doesn’t. The cookies are her boyfriend’s mom’s recipe, and - and this is where Harley interrupts - once you’ve tasted them you, too, will worship at her altar until the end of time as we know it. This sparks one and only one question amidst the judgemental silence.

“You have a boyfriend?”

“Yes, I do.” They are informed that said boyfriend is apparently the one who drove Annabeth here and that, if they hurry, they might be able to catch a glimpse of him, because Annabeth doesn’t keep many pictures on her phone, Pepper.

“Percy’s here?!” It is Harley, of course, that rushes to the door and nearly flings it open, sticking his head out through the opening.

“Yo, Percy!”

“Harley?!” a voice calls back. The rest of his response is lost vaguely to the wind.

“I’m chill. Hey, d’you mind giving me a ride?” Tony makes a noise of objection that Harley waves off, like, dude, I’m trying to have a conversation here. “That’s perfect, man! So, fifteen? Cool.” The wind combined with Harley’s movement shuts the door a little too strongly.

“He’s gotta take a call so you have fifteen more minutes in my vivacious presence,” Harley declares once he makes it back to where they’ve been positioned for the last minute or two.

“And oh how blessed we are,” Tony says.

“So, you know Annabeth’s boyfriend too?” Pepper asks. Natasha isn’t sure why she’s sticking with the boyfriend angle but Pepper’s interests have clearly been piqued and Natasha has known the other red-head long enough to know that she’s not one to give up until she has what she wants. Harley nods. Then he forms a circle with his thumb and index finger and extends his other three fingers, gesturing his approval.

Before he can elaborate, Rhodey warns, “Mongoose alert, six o’clock,” and Morgan barrels into the area, the group parting like the red sea for her arrival. Wordlessly, the container is transferred from Annabeth’s arms to Harley’s.

“Annabeth!!!” is Morgan’s opening statement as she flings herself at the older woman, her arms wide and then suddenly not, clasped around her captive’s legs.

“Hey, Morgan,” Annabeth says, patting the younger girl on the back, who in turn looks up and smiles wide at her. “Word around here is that I missed your birthday.”

“You did!” she says. “But it’s okay, Harley said you were really busy.”

“I hope that doesn’t mean I can’t still give you a gift.”

Tony puts an arm around Harley’s shoulders, pulling him into an aside. “Why do you never introduce me to any of your friends?” he accuses, truly heartbroken.

“Ooh, ooh, ooh! You got me a gift?” Annabeth nods, reaching behind her, her hand reappearing with a small, square, two inch by two inch object only a centimeter thick. She unfolds it into a larger square and presents it to Morgan, who accepts it with wide eyes.

“Ooooh.”

“Why do you never introduce me to your friends in Area 51?” Harley parries as a response, his head tilted upward in an attempt to catch a glimpse of Morgan’s birthday present, peering over his upturned nose. The object changes colour rapidly and vibrantly as the light hits it at different angles, mesmerising for what looks to be a square of laminated paper.

“Is this a fortune teller?” Morgan whispers after a few moments of collective silence. Annabeth only nods. Morgan’s eyes double in size and her eyelids nearly disappear into her face as she slips her fingers into the folds of the fortune teller. She manipulates the device, once, then twice, and then a few times more in rapid succession.

She squeals. “Thank youuuuu!!”

The gift has garnered approval.

Morgan is off like a hurricane, barreling out of their group and towards the unsuspecting party goers in the living and dining rooms, their fortunes accessible to her now in their entirety, the prophecy of their lives in her possession, their strings of fate carefully visible and susceptible to manipulation through the lens that the fortune teller affords her.

Clint is Morgan’s first target. It’s a shame that the confrontation takes place too far away for Natasha to observe the situation properly. (Other than seeing that Morgan climbs onto the table to reach a height slightly more than face-to-face with Clint, thus asserting her fortune-telling (and overall) dominance before she begins.)

(“Oh my god, the answers change too?”)

(“Purple?!!”)

Ten minutes is roughly all it takes for Morgan to barrel through all of the selected participants of the evening, after which point she makes her way back to the group and grasps Harley’s hand, making the telltale noises of sleepiness. Harley ruffles her hair and picks her up, tracing a zig-zag path towards her bedroom.

“Goodnight,” Morgan calls out, both syllables stretched out.

“Goodnight,” they chorus back.

Harley pulls on his incredibly over-stuffed winter coat and tosses a piece sign to the party goers that are further inside the house. He peaks outside again, and this time Natasha can see the dimly lit figure of Annabeth’s boyfriend leaning against a car parked across the street, hanging up a phone.

“You get that haircut yet?” Harley calls out, absolutely unprompted.

“Nah man, not yet,” is the response, not questioning in the slightest. Harley nods to himself as he returns his head to the interior of the house, like, good.

Annabeth is the last to hug Harley goodbye. “No flirting with my boyfriend,” are her parting words, like it’s a reminder for the car journey ahead. Tony, Pepper, and Rhodey are immediately curious, the three of them making nearly identical faces ready to soak up any gossip they can get their hands on.

Harley scoffs. “My dear friend, why would you ask such things of me?” Then he catches sight of the looks being directed his way. “Don’t look at me like that- this is literally old news,” he says. The looks are not deterred. He scoffs. “You’ll get it once you meet him, like. Damn.” If one were to look closely, as Natasha does, one would catch sight of the brief and confident nod Annabeth gives - one of both approval and agreement.

Harley is allotted two more cookies. And then he is off.

By the time Natasha arrived at this year’s festivities, in the first few hours of daylight, the party had already started. In other words, when she lets herself in, How The Grinch Stole Christmas is playing at full volume in the room farthest from the door and Rhodey is pointing at Tony with a candy cane and threatening to wipe his entire goddamn gingerbread village off the map.

“Oh grow up, Platypus, there won’t even be a map for another twelve minutes!”

“‘Grow up?’ How ‘bout you get a life and stop naming all of your gingerbread people 'Matilda’ and ‘Steve but-not-that-Steve’? I will not allow a repeat of 2011.”

She’s not lying when she says she feels right at home.

People filter in throughout the day, staying for anywhere between an hour or two and the rest of the day. Their schedules are all way too busy - some of them take on more than they can handle, some of them take on just the right amount but don’t leave any wiggle room.

It doesn’t really matter though. It’s an unspoken rule that attendance for Christmas Eve’s Eve is mandatory for all Avengers and Avengers-aligned people.

The Guardians swing in around noon and stay for nearly exactly as long as the runtime of Home Alone three, the sequel that was unnecessary but not a real disappointment when you consider the fourth and final installment in the series.

Harley emerges from his bedroom only a while after Natasha arrives, equipped with a medium-strength case of bedhead and bright red and green pajamas that don’t get changed out of until after the sun goes down. Peter and May arrive at an appropriate time in the mid-morning and stay until there’s just enough sunlight left for them to make it back to their apartment.

(Natasha assumes it’s because May doesn’t like to drive in the dark. Then she sees that Peter is the one that gets into the driver’s seat, and she tucks that tidbit of information away for later.)

Steve stays an hour (nearly to the minute) and takes Bucky with him when he leaves - Bucky, who had gotten there with Sam an hour before Steve and an hour after Natasha, just minutes after Clint’s arrival.

To call it a revolving door would be inaccurate. It wouldn’t do it justice.

(Because Christmas Eve’s Eve was a throw-away comment from Tony fifteen years ago and a melancholy memory on the day that was supposed to be the third time around.)

(Because it’s not set in stone. Where mandatory attendance is an unspoken rule, a light atmosphere and the air of just another day isn’t - it’s a promise. Unspoken and uncertain, but a promise nonetheless.)

Dinner this time around is spaghetti and meatballs - a giant plate of it sitting in the middle of the dinner table that seats the nine attendees that have stayed for dinner. Conversation is light around the table as they eat, and soon enough their meal is done and it’s time for dessert.

The cake is by now a distant memory, its empty center spot taken instead by Annabeth’s container of strangely-coloured cookies. She peels the lid off and it only takes three seconds for the smell to hit their noses. Eyebrows are raised around the table; gazes are exchanged to make sure that everyone is getting this.

Natasha makes use of their preoccupation to snag the first cookie. It’s still faintly warm.

“Why’s it blue?” Stephen asks tentatively.

“Tradition,” Annabeth says simply.

An explosion of chocolate flavour erupts on her palate and she has to take a few moments to grasp how good it tastes before she makes her move. In an arc, her hand makes its way back to the container, scooping up four more cookies and depositing them on her plate.

Sam scoffs at her across the table and others do the same, including Clint. But the archer still recognizes what’s happening, scooping up four cookies for himself and trying the first. She’s surprised his jaw doesn’t fall to the floor from the look on his face. 

Soon, everyone else has a cookie in their hands.

“What the fuck?” Tony says after his second cookie has been taken care of, and Annabeth - who sits to Natasha’s right - just smiles knowingly before grabbing a handful of cookies for herself.

The conversation continues on; Bruce and Stephen talk in semi-hushed burden-of-science tones while the rest of them have a larger conversation, Clint and Pepper keeping a back and forth going on either side of Sam, who’s caught up in a line of thought with Rhodey and Tony but isn’t kept from commenting on Pepper’s points either.

Annabeth tugs at her turtleneck and pushes a barely-there strand of hair behind her air, twisting it until it crosses under too many of the strands of hair leading into her braid to escape. Natasha’s eyes meet Rhodey’s directly on the other side of Annabeth. And then she sees it.

The sight that first greeted her at the facility was shattered glass and a body, one leg in a position that it shouldn’t have been and the other stained with a light coat of red. She’d seen it from afar but made note of the uniform before her eyes had traveled to the missing pane of glass in the skywalk three stories above them.

She’d entered the building and disregarded the few uniformed hostiles that were hightailing to the van across the street - they were too far away and she was already in the building. Normally, she’d have preferred to dispatch the backup first and then head inside, but this wasn’t a normal situation.

Any and all hostiles were dispatched by her widow bites, regardless of if she’d used other methods to incapacitate them originally. The path she’d committed to mind traced out in front of her. She’d passed splotches of blood on the floor she hadn’t put there - stains on the carpeting that indicated the pooled blood of a hostile but didn’t have any hostiles near them.

The first proper meeting she had with the babysitter took place in the room with the puzzles in it. She’d seen the babysitter before, not up close, just in passing. Blonde, somewhere near six feet, average built - only a rough outline. She’d heard about her more than that though, some from Morgan, some from Tony and Pepper, a bit here and there from Harley. Not really enough to make a clear picture of her.

The first thing she saw of the girl was her running shoes, popping out from the vent opening in the ceiling before she started descending, lowering herself, Morgan wrapped around her as she emerged. Then her head, hair tied up in a severe ponytail, small pieces of glass visible amidst the strands on her head.

Arm stained with blood and the back of her sweater moist with the same, the girl had held herself steadily - not that Natasha had noticed in the moment. She’d only noticed later, standing in front of her on the medical floor, having poured over footage with Rhodey while the babysitter was getting treated.

She hadn’t focused on her attitude any more than necessary. The babysitter helped them with making up sketches for three of the hostiles that had gotten away, and described a tattoo that a few of them shared - a lead that was bound to get them somewhere.

(And she didn’t notice much about the way the babysitter had held herself. Hadn’t gone digging into the blood stains in the carpeting that were put there by someone else. Somehow hadn’t connected the dots between a man thrown out of a window and the evidence of injury still drying on the ground.)

(A broken nose among a captured hostile’s injuries that wasn’t of her doing was never reported to her. Two other concussions were handled the same way. Because Natasha Romanov took down a group of men with bad intentions towards her goddaughter and the medical staff were only surprised at the injuries because of the restraint they showed.)

(There were things that she didn’t notice then.)

And then there’s the thing she notices now.

Natasha, Rhodey and Annabeth tag-team the dishes.

Outside of the dining room, they pass through the living room and into the kitchen with the plates and the utensils. One trip each is enough for those. Another is what it takes for the food plates and half-filled containers to arrive at their kitchen destination, where they start the sorting and final arrangements.

“You know, I haven’t been to Marin County in a while,” is how Rhodey starts it, and it’s as good a way as any.

“Yeah?” Natasha says.

“Yeah,” he says, “it has to have been at least a good ten years by now - me and Pepper went up Mount Tam- you ever been?”

“Once,” Natasha says, and it’s true. “A few years back.” And that part isn’t necessarily as true. She doesn’t need to check in to see if Annabeth is paying attention to the conversation since the younger woman is positioned between her and Rhodey, and has been part of the conversation since the three of them got up from the table within seconds of each other.

Rhodey humms. “Is it any different? Because last time I was there, the rocks didn’t have arms.”

“I’m not sure,” Natasha says, and Annabeth moves to the other side of Rhodey, slipping some leftovers into the fridge. “They didn’t have arms when I was there either, but it must’ve changed since then.” When Annabeth turns towards them again, having closed the fridge door, they’re both facing her.

“I haven’t seen any rocks with arms,” she puts in, as nonchalant as the two of them have been in their tones of voice. Their gazes remain on her, light and not judgmental, if they had to be described.

“Your turtleneck is very in line with the holiday spirit,” Rhodey says. And then there’s a beat. He taps a spot behind his ear a few times, and Natasha can almost spot the miniscule shift that happens in Annabeth’s eyes. It could’ve just as easily been a trick of the light. “It only reaches up so far though.”

“I’m aware,” she says, her demeanor not changing as one would suspect.

“Annabeth,” Rhodey says, and Natasha recognizes the tone, “I hope that you realize how much we value you. How you reacted the other day, your relationship with Morgan, all of it. I’m telling you this in case you don’t know, and so that you do know that if you ever have any problems, we’re all behind you.”

Natasha brings a hand up and taps her cheekbone to indicate Annabeth’s own, and the bruise that sits atop it. “How did that happen?”

“I face planted on some rocks,” the babysitter says, and Natasha believes her.

“Rocks don’t have arms,” Rhodey continues, moving on to the matter most clearly at hand. He gestures clearly to his neck. “What happened?” It’s only a question of why it happened and who did it, because they already know what happened. That was clear as day the moment Natasha saw the thumb-shaped bruise behind her ear.

Someone tried to choke her goddaughter’s babysitter. And from behind. Trying to choke someone with your hands is personal - deeply - and doing it from behind carries its own suggestions that Natasha doesn’t take the time to diagnose. There’s a beat of silence - of a lack of an answer.

“Are you okay?” Rhodey asks, genuine as he always is.

“I’m perfectly fine,” she says at last.

“Annabeth,” Natasha says. “However this happened, whoever did this, it isn’t fine.”

“I’m fine,” Annabeth says. “I appreciate the sentiment, but I don’t appreciate the concern. I hope you’ll respect that and leave it be.”

The conversation ends like that, because Annabeth puts the last plate in the dishwasher and starts moving back towards the dining room. She has an air about her that Natasha would probably appreciate if it didn’t piss her off in the way that it does.

When Annabeth leaves, it’s her boyfriend who drives her once again. This time, Natasha looks closer at him, barely acknowledging that Rhodey seems to do the same.

Her boyfriend meets her halfway, walking back with her the rest of the way to his car. All Natasha sees is that his arm moves first to go around her shoulders before it changes direction and settles around her waist.

He knows, is what the movement tells her. And Natasha can’t be sure what that means.

Chapter Text

Annabeth stands at the door for a few seconds before she rings the doorbell, fixing the sleeve of her knitted sweater and pulling at a thread parting from the strap of her backpack. The snow falls gently to the ground around her, not strong enough to start coating it just yet, but getting there. The impacts she feels on her skin are cool and refreshing, making her lose sight of the fact that she’ll probably regret wearing a sweater within the first few moments of being inside the controlled environment of the house.

Once she rings, it’s only a few seconds before Mr. Stark is ushering her in with one hand, his body facing away from her as he tells FRIDAY to reschedule his last meeting of the day.

“I swear, when I said you deserve an extended holiday, I did mean more than a week,” he greets. Technically, it’s been eight days since Christmas Eve’s Eve, so there’s that, and she doesn’t have all that much to do today regardless.

Her classes at camp are scheduled for every day this week except today, Percy’s been trying to get the campers interested in canoeing for a reason other than the fact that he’s the instructor for hours, Estelle has recently banished Annabeth from her room because she’s working on a surprise for her, and next semester doesn’t start for a good bit, so it’s mostly just a win-win situation.

Except for the whole part about it being forty-something minute notice, which is just distinctly not cool. Most of the time. But Mr. Stark seemed to have forgotten that it was January second, which, mood, so whatever.

“Peter?” Mr. Stark calls as the door sways towards its more natural position, not quite closing but moving close enough to block out any of the more unwanted natural elements. “Hurry up, kiddo, clock’s ticking.”

The position of the door signals to her that it’s not a loose breeze or a sudden rush of cold air that sends a faint shiver up her arm. It’s also not what makes the hairs on her neck stand up and prickly needles sound on her arm like they’re playing an out-of-tune xylophone.

“Coming!”

But it’s all very faint and it’s probably just the temperature change and it’s just not the same feeling she gets when there are monsters around so she doesn’t really spare enough mental energy to care at the moment.

The patter of footsteps that don’t match Morgan’s familiar size and frame sounds down the hallway, signalling Peter's arrival into the room and giving Annabeth her first look at one of the more infamous members of Morgan’s extended family.

A head of curly brown hair that matches the colour of his eyes sits on broad shoulders. He seems to be around six feet tall, younger than Annabeth definitely- most likely somewhere around eighteen - Harley’s age.

Her first reaction isn’t exactly that she doesn’t like what she sees, but that she doesn’t like what she feels. She doesn’t like it at all. Because there aren’t any more pricking needles or standing hairs. Only a disgruntled feeling deep in her gut that’s all too familiar, and the phantom pinches that return to her arms.

It’s the borderline discomfort that gets her first, coming in place of the need to fight back that usually accompanies raised hairs and shivers running up her forearms. Not liking what she sees is more of an afterthought. A justification.

“You got your phone?” Mr. Stark asks, and Peter wiggles the bright-blue-phone-case-clad Stark phone in front of him before he slips it into one of the back pockets of his jeans.

“Right here. And before you ask, the rest of my stuff is already in the car, just like it was the last time you asked, and just like it has been for the last-“

“Don’t kill a guy for trying to be a little organized, Pete, especially after last time.”

“Is ‘especially after last time’ gonna be your catchphrase from now on?”

“It might just be,” Mr. Stark says with an overly sweet grin, before moving closer and throwing an arm over Peter’s shoulder, beginning to guide him towards the door. “Especially after last time.”

Annabeth steps to the side just after she remembers that she never moved from the door, trying to knock her body back into orbit from this weird place of uncomfortable energy that she’s trying to dismiss.

“Ah,” Mr. Stark says, “Peter, this is Annabeth Chase, the well-rounded babysitter; Annabeth, meet Peter Parker, part-time high school senior, full-time Morgan-apologist.”

Annabeth tries and fails in her attempts not to notice the way that Peter rubs his fingers down from the middle to the base of his hand, where his thumb meets his wrist, slipping his other hand into his back pocket, resting it there as he gives a nod at his introduction. He splits a smile at the last descriptor.

“Nice to meet you,” he says, the fidget continuing, grabbing a fraction of Annabeth’s attention as she remembers to make eye contact. “I’ve heard great things from Morgan- and from everyone else too, y’know, not just her.” He offers a hand for her to shake.

“Thanks,” she says, taking it. “You too.” A weak jolt that goes up her arm - a feeling she recognizes even after months of not being harassed by a spider. It’s a feeling she elects to ignore temporarily.

“And with that, we gotta be off,” Mr. Stark says, maneuvering himself and Peter out the door without difficulty, sending a ‘BYE MORGAN!’ behind him and waiting until he gets the faint response - ‘BYE!!!’ - before he, along with Peter, gives a wave, shutting the door behind them.

The door doesn’t have a little window in it for being able to see outside, nor does she have the force of will to use the peephole, so the faint sound of the car’s engine is what ultimately tells her that they’ve left. It’s also what tells her that she should emerge from her thoughts and stop looking vaguely at the door.

Because so what if her skin is slowly returning to its regular not-crawling state? Things happen, Peter seems like an all-around good guy, and even if she did have a reason not to trust him, it’s not like she’ll be seeing him much. So what if the feeling of pricking needles reminds her of being four and always awake in the middle of the night?

So what if Peter Parker is Spider-Man?

Everyone who lives in New York and their mother has a saved-by-the-bell story ready to share where the bell is actually Spider-Man. Harley says he’s chill. And that’s usually something Annabeth can take his word on.

Morgan’s painting a mural in her room today, and, so far, it consists solely of a very large circle painted on the very center of the wall in bright red. This circle originally had a radius of one foot. It’s been slowly but surely expanding for over an hour.

As it stands, the circle has a radius of two and a half feet.

Additionally, Annabeth has a small circle painted with an identical shade of red on the back of her left hand, roughly the size of a large apple, as well as an asterisk on the left side of her forehead, the former courtesy of a circle-painting tutorial requested by Morgan, and the latter courtesy of an accidental splatter that the younger girl had graciously turned into something more purposeful.

It’ll wash off.

“What are you thinking for lunch, Morgan?” she asks once Morgan has lowered her ‘wait, I’m concentrating, don’t speak’ hand and started staring intently at her latest brush stroke.

“Hmmmm,” she says sagely. Annabeth nods assessingly and finds that she agrees with the statement.

Silence dances between them as Morgan weighs her head from side to side, hopefully entertaining the question before she goes back to painting and not the other way around.

“What about pizza?” Morgan says finally. “But...”

“But,” Annabeth whispers, mostly to herself.

“But home-made.”

“You wanna make pizza?”

Morgan shakes her head, loose strands of hair waving in the air, some of which land on a spot of paint beside her brow and come away stained red. “I’m not done with my circle- you make pizza.”

And so Annabeth is dubbed the on-duty pizza maker.

She’s barely two steps into the kitchen - one sleeve rolled up and the other in progress - when the doorbell rings, making her adjust direction accordingly and head towards the door.

“Mr. Wilson and Mr. Barnes are at the door, Miss Chase.”

“Thanks, FRIDAY.” She opens the door. Sam Wilson she recognizes, having been introduced to the man just last week, while ‘Mr. Barnes’ she does not, which forces her to guess based on the limited prior knowledge she has about the Avengers. “Hi.” It sounds vaguely like a mix between a greeting and a question.

“Hey,” Sam says, “Annabeth, right?” She nods.

“Mr. Wilson and Mr. Barnes?” she clarifies, pointing to each of them in turn as she steps aside and allows them entry. They file inside and Annabeth closes the door behind them.

He shakes his head, holding up his pointer finger and saying, “Sam.”

As if they had coordinated, the other man puts up his own finger and adds, “Bucky.”

“Hmmm,” she says. Reading between the lines must be a prerequisite skill for Avengers because Sam does so efficiently.

“We’re looking for Tony.”

“But he isn’t here,” Bucky guesses.

“He isn’t,” Annabeth confirms, “he left with Peter-” without the physical movement of checking her watch, it would be impossible for her to pinpoint how long it’s been, but that’s why she has a watch “-nearly two hours ago.”

“All right,” Sam says, looking like he’s trying very hard not to sigh. Now that she spends a moment on the thought, both of the men have the classic indicators of too-little-sleep.

They’ve drifted into the kitchen-adjacent living room by now, so Annabeth gravitates to the spot behind the counter and begins to gather the needed ingredients as the two men discuss the situation quietly amongst themselves.

Okay. The dough first. Flour, water, yeast- where do they keep the yeast? With the dry ingredients or in the fridge? Because Sally keeps it in the fridge but it’s never in the fridge in the store, it’s just on the regular shelves. She’ll just check while she’s getting the flour and if it’s not there then she’ll know.

The yeast is not with the dry ingredients. Now she knows.

She’s not sure what stray piece of conversation she catches but it’s exactly what she needs in order to remember to tell them, “Mr. Stark should be back in around an hour.”

All right then, flour, water, yeast, salt, and honey - all check. And then the tomato paste - check. Toppings. Okay, what are the options for toppings?

There aren’t any pineapples in the house (it’s at this point that Annabeth asks FRIDAY to pull up a list of the items they have in the house, which is next to useless but is appreciated nonetheless) so it’s nowhere near the time for that conversation.

She tries not to squint too heavily as she picks out the items from the list that would be up for consideration. Bell peppers, olives, pepperoni, mushrooms - do they have cheese? all right, yes they have cheese - spinach, and onions. Now to decide- no, actually, dough first, then topping decisions, it’s time to prioritize.

She meets her first obstacle as she begins to measure out the flour. She hums to herself, and then shifts her gaze to the two men, which they catch sight of rather quickly.

“So,” she says. “Are you staying?”

“Umm.”

“If you’re staying,” she continues, “you need to tell me now, because otherwise there won’t be enough pizza to go around.”

“Well.”

They’re staying.

Bucky takes issue with Annabeth’s pizza dough recipe. After patiently listening to his criticism for a minute or two (“You make some good points.”), she vetoes it without mercy, as he is patently wrong.

“So Morgan’s painting today?” Sam says.

It takes a moment for Annabeth to answer, wondering how he’s aware of today’s plans. When she finally figures it out, she lets out a huff, using the back of her hand to prod her forehead. Sure enough, her hand makes contact with the flakey surface of dried paint.

“It’s his master skills of deduction,” Bucky puts in, continuing to slice bell peppers - one yellow and one red - methodically on the other side of the counter.

“She’s painting a mural,” Annabeth says. “It’s very red at the moment.”

“Interesting,” Sam says dryly at the same time that the other man says, “Really? I thought it was green.”

By the time the dough is ready for the next step and the oven has been preheated, the tomato paste has mysteriously disappeared from the counter, and Annabeth knows exactly who is to blame.

Bucky slides forward a tomato sauce that is most certainly not what she had arranged with a look that does not contain a shred of remorse. It takes all her self-control not to blink at him in a very unimpressed manner.

Sam scoffs, still chopping away at the last of the mushrooms.

“If you put too much oregano, it’ll turn out dry and clump together.”

“Criticizing my cooking will get you nowhere but-” the words stop on her tongue as she remember that she’s not talking to her friends in the CHB kitchen on a particularly low-staffed night, and that ’criticising my cooking will get you nowhere but stranded in a ditch’ isn’t the most appropriate thing to say to a close family friend of your charge.

Both of the men seem to grin at the same time. “But?”

“Hmm,” she says.

Once the pizzas are in the oven, she very apprehensively leaves them in the care of the two grown men, who only seem slightly offended at her actions. She continues down the hallway and back to Morgan’s room to start the clean-up with enough time remaining for lunch to begin.

Morgan explains that the whole wall will just have a red base coat. (That is, the whole wall up to the line of tape that was placed there early this morning, at the exact point where Morgan’s reach ended.)

It’s a nice and bright red colour, and it goes well with the giant ladybug plushy that’s been placed under a thin layer of plastic protection for the day’s activities. Annabeth voices her genuine approval of the artistic decision.

By the time clean-up is done and they make their way back to the kitchen, Annabeth is pleased to see that they have followed her instructions of switching the pizzas’ positions within the oven despite the fact that they insisted there was no way that this house’s oven was unevenly heated.

Mr. Stark’s return to the house coincides with the exact moment that Annabeth sets the last pizza on the table, and only a few minutes past the time he’d told her - and she, in turn, had told the two men - he’d return by.

“I’ve returned!” Closing the door behind himself, he seems to have just enough time to spot the day’s lunch before Morgan starts skipping towards him and drags him along towards her room by his hand. He sends a nod of acknowledgement towards Sam and Bucky before he disappears from view.

“Looks good,” Sam comments before heading into the kitchen, grabbing a set of plates and returning to the table. Annabeth extracts her watch from her pocket, strapping it back on and readjusting her sleeves.

She turns her wrist to double check that she actually saw what she thinks she saw, confirming the fact that there’s an indentation in the side of the watch - a result of some type of venom most likely, and a powerful one at that since her watch is coated with a layer of a demigod-engineered experimental metal meant to mimic celestial bronze and some of its more useful defensive properties.

She can’t pinpoint what fight exactly it’s from, but, then again, she doesn’t really care at the moment. It won’t make any difference in fixing it.

She swings her backpack back onto her shoulder at the same time that Mr. Stark re-enters the kitchen, Morgan moving past him and taking a seat at the table. He follows, taking the one to her left and motioning for them to do the same.

“To what do I owe this unexpected appearance?” he asks. It’s only another second before Annabeth notices the grease still staining her right hand.

“Ross is getting a head-start this year, eleven months? Remember?” Mr. Stark sighs. “Our meeting?” Sam continues, taking a seat of his own as Bucky does the same.

“FRIDAY?” Mr. Stark says - accuses, nearly.

“I do not have a record of this meeting, Boss, as you never scheduled it with me.” Annabeth expects that Mr. Stark makes an extremely offended face at the response, but, unfortunately, she’s too busy washing her hands to see it.

“And I’m here for the pizza,” Bucky says, “however questionably made it is.” Annabeth doesn’t scoff. She doesn’t. 

Seriously. She doesn’t. She’s much too refined to do that. No muttering anything under her breath, either. Very refined.

She finishes drying her hands and returns the cloth to its place on the railing just in front of the counter before swinging her backpack over her shoulder once again.

“Annabeth,” Mr. Stark says, and she turns towards him. He’s standing, making his way into the kitchen just as she’s finished making her way out. “Pizza here or to-go?”

Estelle estimated she needed only half a day more until her surprise was finished, but Annabeth’s pretty sure she can pry her away for a few minutes via the promise of pizza. “To-go.”

“Alright, pick out your pieces while I get a container.”

She ends up taking four slices, and Mr. Stark ends up walking her to the door.

“Seriously though this time,” he says. “Extended holiday. Many, many days. Meetings are getting fewer and farther between, plus Rhodey’s gonna be in the city more permanently than before, so your load should be lighter. Babysitting-wise, at least.” Annabeth nods.

“I’ll send you an update on the mural. Morgan’ll definitely want your opinion. If it gets any less red I’ll riot,” he muses. Who wouldn’t?

“Exactly,” he says. Apparently she said that out loud.

Estelle doesn’t accept the pizza bribe.

Annabeth puts a slice aside for her and another for Paul, sharing the rest with Sally. Food-based bribes are great for getting people to tell you about their day, and Annabeth tries her best to be a good listener.

Chapter Text

Annabeth gets another three full weeks off before some Senator gets back to DC and lets out a slew of words that together create a comment that, according to Ms. Potts, is a candidate for the stupidest interview given on live television throughout all of space and time. General Ross, apparently in town, joins in on the conversation within two hours, and Mr. Stark is on a plane with Captain America and two other Avengers before the end of the day for damage control.

Thus, Annabeth pulls a double and is at the Potts-Stark house for all daylight hours of the next Monday and Tuesday—which, admittedly, isn’t many, seeing as it’s still winter.

Winter passes very quickly into spring, which turns out to be just about five seconds long, and propels her into the next summer before she has any idea of what’s actually happening.

A little under a week after the summer solstice, Mr. Stark gives her the same spiel as he did after New Years.

“Way extended holiday,” he says, as totally earnest as he was the last time. “Summer’s coming up, so everyone’s in town—because I have the best vacation spots in my pocket, obviously—so way less babysitting for you.”

She’s skeptical, but out of the not nonexistent amount of respect she has for the man, she doesn’t let it show.

Summer does make her babysitting load lighter, as it turns out.

Any free time that fact generates is quickly taken up by Camp, which is where she is every second she’s not at her new Co-op placement, and she can’t really complain.

At the end of the day, being a counsellor is still volunteer work, seeing as she isn’t paid, so there’s no denying that she’s there by choice.

When September rolls around, she even misses it.

Her counsellor duties get passed during the non-summer months, so it leaves her just a little off-balance not to have a cabin full of people in need of watching as she starts her new semester.

Mr. Stark, whether by sensing this fact through his psychic abilities, or through some other, more boring reason, fixes the feeling before the end of the second week.

New York law mandates that children attend first grade in the fall of the calendar year they turn six unless exceptional circumstances can be demonstrated, and Mr. and Mrs. Stark-Potts (after heavy argument, from what Annabeth can gather) decline to demonstrate any.

This fact cuts down Annabeth’s full day stretches significantly, and the reduced time Morgan’s parents get to spend with her makes weekend shifts nearly disappear.

So, her remaining shifts turn almost formulaic: accompany Happy to pick up Morgan from school, get driven back to the house, watch, feed, and entertain Morgan as needed until bedtime, stay until nightfall, and then be relieved by one of the rotating cast members of Morgan’s extended family.

Very straightforward.

The second week of October, she and Percy meet Harley for coffee while he’s in town at a little bakery down the street from Sally’s apartment.

She gets a muffin, they get scones, and Harley tells Percy about MIT, her about his mom, and then mentions that Tony had squashed the plotting of a kidnapping threat at Morgan’s school two nights previous. The fourth major one since she’d started attending.

“Shit,” Percy says. “They get everyone?”

“Yeah, systematic dismantling,” he assures them.

Morgan makes friend like it’s a competition, in spite of it all. She doesn’t keep them all long, of course, since she’s six, but she makes them back just as fast.

Even though school doesn’t fully challenge her in most areas, she seems to like it.

Annabeth, at least, can’t help but think it’s good for her.

“At snack time,” she tells her one Wednesday, “Olivia gave me her juice and I gave her my grapes. I don’t like grapes. They’re weird.”

“Really? I love grapes.”

“Ew,” Morgan says. She dismantles a hill of blocks for more material for her tower, stacking the blocks higher and higher.

Twenty minutes later, and Morgan’s dismantled and reassembled the tower half a dozen times and has not once lost it to gravity before she’s gotten tired of the latest iteration.

It’s impressive, but Annabeth’s pretty sure this is the one that will be the exception to the rule.

Another red block goes on top of the latest green and the hairs on Annabeth’s arm jolt a bit in irritation.

She hears it first—very faint, harsh, and quick, like a staccato beat. Whatever it is, it’s far away, and with the insulation they have in the walls of this house, the sound reverberates awkwardly, making it impossible to make a reasonable guess of which direction it’s coming from.

She thinks it’s in the general direction of Manhattan, but she can’t be sure one way or the other.

The tremor that follows and finally breaks Morgan’s tower streak isn’t indicative, either, though it is slightly more concerning. It’s faint, so there’s a chance it’s from an earthquake a few cities over, or even construction nearby, but she highly doubts it.

Too quick for an earthquake, and too quiet for construction.

Explosion, she thinks.

Her phone gives her the confirmation. Explosion in Midtown, on the edge of the Garment district, some high rise development and/or skyscraper, though the news hasn’t been specific.

She recognizes the placement of the skyline behind the building in the photos of the explosion (which is, to put it mildly, rather impressive), so can come up with a general placement for it amidst the sea of buildings, but she doesn’t really care much about that.

Fingers crossed, the chances are that it was an accident. New York really, totally, and definitely does not need any other occurrences for at least another six to eight months, though what it’s due is closer to six to eight decades.

Morgan blows out an exaggerated breath and gets to work on rebuilding her tower, though what she’s trying to achieve, Annabeth still can’t discern.

She opens her messages app and navigation to Percy’s name.

Fine. Not in the city. Still at work, she types out. Where are you?

She’s not too proud to admit that she spends the next minute scrolling through the news to see what’s going on. Percy’ll respond when he’s able and in the meantime, she’s not immune to being information hungry.

The latest pictures show Spider-man and Iron Man on sight, helping out the firefighters with making quick work of the flames and the people trapped on the floor of the explosion.

“Ms. Chase,” FRIDAY says, interrupting her scrolling. Annabeth looks up. “Boss requests that you activate the safe room feature of the study, as a precaution, given your proximity to the incident.”

Her phone dings quietly.

PJ: Was 1 block N. Fine. Hurt my arm. At mom’s now until we get the all clear.

She responds with a quick thumbs up emoji. That’s one thing taken care of, and it helps put her mind at ease about Sally and Paul, too.

“Sure,” she says belatedly.

“‘Incident’?” Morgan repeats, curious.

“There’s a fire in the city,” Annabeth explains, barely hearing the quiet hisses that signal the implementation of the safe room protocols.

“Is Dad there?”

“Yep,” Annabeth says, “he’s helping the firefighters put it out. Spider-man’s there, too.” And probably missing a lecture, or at the very least the ability to not smell like smoke for the next two to four days.

Morgan nods along and crawls a bit away from Annabeth to get more of her blocks. She’s adjusted pretty well to the whole ‘my dad is a superhero’ thing as her parents have gradually started sharing more about it with her.

The walls of the study take on a metallic sheen as the safe room protocol fully engages. Morgan doesn’t notice.

It’s forty minutes until the explosion and its fallout is fully resolved, and Mr. Stark has FRIDAY inform them of that promptly, along with a message signalling his return in fifteen minutes.

The un-metallicization of the walls coincides with the next text from Percy.

PJ: All clear is in. Pick you up?

AC: Done in 20

AC: ♥

Mr. Stark rolls into the house fifteen minutes later, as promised, and Annabeth almost suggests they mark the occasion so that it can truly go down in the history books as the first time she’s ever been released from shift by the man on time in her entire career as a babysitter.

She also pretends not to decipher Peter Parker’s totally coincidental arrival at the house two minutes later, definitely having just come from class at Columbia and absolutely, for sure, not smelling of smoke of any kind, no, Sir.

She waits at the bottom of the steps for Percy to pull up, swinging her backpack back over one shoulder once she spots his car turning in to the street.

He slows to a stop just a few feet away from where she’s waiting for him and she leans in through the open window to snag a kiss before she actually gets in to the car.

His right forearm is bandaged under his sleeves, and tiny spots of blood stain it red in about a half dozen places.

“Broken glass,” he says, and puts the car back into drive.

Annabeth hums.

“Movie?”

“Pizza.”

“Donuts,” she agrees.